gregari, aggregari; kudde wijs, gregatim, catervatim, q. 'to curr together.' The same Game is called Harry Hurcheon in the North of Scotland, either from the resemblance of one in this position to a hurcheon, or hedge-hog, squatting under a bush; or from the Belg. hurk-en, to squat, to hurkle."

DRAWING DUN OUT OF THE MIRE,

Says Steevens, "seems to have been a Game." In an old collection of Satyres and Epigrams it is enumerated among other pastimes"At Shove-groate, Venter-point, or Crosse and Pile,

At leaping o'er a Midsummer Bone-fier,
Or at the drawing Dun out of the myer."

So in the Dutchess of Suffolke (1631)—

"Well done, my Masters, lend your hands,
Draw Dun out of the Ditch,

Draw, pull, helpe all, so, so, well done."

They had shoved Bishop Bonner into a well, and were pulling him

out.

In fact, we have a notice of it as early as Chaucer's time, in the Manciple's Prologue

"Then gan our hoste to jape and to play

And sayd; sires, what? Dun is in the Mire."

The mode in which the game was played Douce confessed his inability to explain. Later researches, however, enable us to say that it was somewhat in this wise. A log of wood, which they called "Dun" after the cart-horse, was brought into the middle of the room; whereupon the cry was raised that he was stuck in the mire. The assembled gambollers advanced, either with or without ropes, to draw him out; and, finding themselves unable to do it, they called for more assistance. The game was prolonged until all the company were engaged in the sportive effort, when Dun, of course, was extricated. The awkward efforts of the rustics to lift the log, and the numerous sly contrivances to drop the ends on the toes of those so engaged, naturally provoked no little amusement.

DRAW GLOVES.

The following Jeu d'esprit is found in a Pleasant Grove of New Fancies (1657)

Draw Gloves.

"At Draw-Gloves wee'l play,
And prethee let's lay

A Wager, and let it be this;

Who first to the Summe

Of twenty doth come,

Shall have for his winning a Kisse."

Herrick also has an allusion to the diversion.

DUCK AND DRAKE,

Butler, in his Hudibras, makes it one of the important qualifications of his conjurer to tell

"What figur'd Slates are best to make,

On watry surface Duck or Drake."

This pastime, silly though it be, is inferior to few in point of antiquity. The Greeks called it erooтpaкioμos. It was played with flat shells, and the palm of victory was assigned to the boy whose shell rebounded oftenest from the surface before it finally went down.

From this came the proverbial expression for spending one's substance extravagantly. In Green's Tu Quoque we have "He has thrown away as much in ducks and drakes as would have bought some five thousand capons."

Misson says

FOOT-BALL.

"In Winter Foot-Ball is a useful and charming Exercise. It is a Leather Ball about as big as one's Head, fill'd with Wind. This is kick'd about from one to t'other in the streets, by him that can get at it, and that is all the art of it."

It is hard to determine the period at which the game originated; but it appears among the popular exercises in the reign of Edward III. The pursuit of this and other pastimes, however, interfering with the practice of archery, it was prohibited by a public edict in the 39th year of that monarch's reign, in 1349.

GOFF OR GOLF.

Strutt takes this to be one of the most ancient games played with the ball, requiring the assistance of a club or bat. The Latin name cambuca, applied to it in the reign of Edward III., arose no doubt from the crooked club or bat with which it was played. The bat was also called a bandy from its being bent; and hence the game itself was frequently called bandy-ball.

Goff was fashionable with the nobility in the opening of the seventeenth century; and it was one of the exercises with which Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., occasionally diverted himself. A pleasant anecdote preserves this fact. The prince had warned his schoolmaster to stand farther off while he was engaged in the game; but the pedagogue, who was deep in conversation with another attendant, heeded not the admonition; and the prince was about to lift his club to strike the ball, when one by him exclaimed: "Beware that you hit not Master Newton." Thereupon, drawing back his hand, the royal pupil observed: "Had I done so, I had but paid my debts." Jamieson derives Golf from the Dutch kolf, a club; Wachter from klopp-en, to strike.

Golf and football seem to have been prohibited in Scotland by James II. in 1457; and again in 1491, by James IV. The ball used at this game was stuffed very hard with feathers. According to

Strutt, the game is much practised in the North of England; and Jamieson testifies to its popularity in Scotland; where it maintains its ground to this day.

In the Gentleman's Magazine for February 1795 mention is made of shinty match, a game also peculiar to North Britain, somewhat similar to golf.

Jamieson defines SHINTY "an inferior species of golf generally played at by young people;" and he adds that in London it is called hockey.

GOOSE-RIDING.

This barbarous sport, popular in Derbyshire down to a very recent period, consisted in suspending by the legs a goose, with its neck greased, to a cord tied to a couple of trees or posts, and in trying to pull off the bird's head while riding by it on horseback at full speed; the goose being the prize of the successful competitor. A century ago the sport of "riding the goose" was in vogue at Edinburgh. Across the road was placed a bar, to which they affixed a goose with its neck greased; and at this the emulous candidates plucked. In Newmarket (1771) we have it recorded that it was no unusual diversion in the North of England "to tie a rope across a street and let it swing about the distance of ten yards from the ground. To the middle of this a living cock is tied by the legs. As he swings in the air, a set of young people ride one after another, full speed, under the rope, and, rising in their stirrups, catch at the animal's head which is close clipped and well soaped in order to elude the grasp. Now he who is able to keep his seat in his saddle and his hold of the bird's head, so as to carry it off in his hand, bears away the palm and becomes the noble hero of the day." The modern version of this barbarous pastime has been divested of its cruel element. A pig with greased tail now-a-days furnishes diversion at fairs.

HANDY-DANDY.

Boyer's Dictionary defines handy-dandy to be a kind of play with the hands; and Ainsworth explains it "digitis micare," that is, moving the fingers up and down very swiftly so as to render the task of telling the number held up difficult. Johnson gives the word as signifying a play in which children change hands and places; a view confirmed by the passage in King Lear: "See how yon Justice rails upon yon simple thief! Hark, in thine ear! Change places, and-handydandy-which is the Justice? which is the thief?' Malone interprets it as a juvenile sport, something being shaken between the two hands and a guess made as to the hand in which it is deposited; and this interpretation is supported by Florio's Italian Dictionary (1598), in which the word Bazzicchiare is rendered "to shake between two hands; to play handy-dandy."

Scriblerus, forbidding certain sports to his son Martin until he is better informed of their antiquity, expounds that neither cross and pile, nor ducks and drakes, are quite of the antiquity of handy-dandy,

though the first attracted the notice of Macrobius and St Augustine, and the second of Minutius Felix; "but handy-dandy is mentioned by Aristotle, Plato, and Aristophanes." Arbuthnot goes on to explain the antiquity of the play called by the Italians cinque and by the French mourre. "It was played by Hymen and Cupid at the marriage of Psyche, and termed by the Latins digitis micare."

HOT-COCKLES,

From the French hautes-coquilles, is a game in which one kneels and, covering his eyes, lays his head in another's lap and guesses who struck him. Gay describes it thus-

"As at Hot-Cockles once I laid me down
I felt the weighty hand of many a clown.

Buxoma gave a gentle tap, and I

Quick rose and read soft mischief in her eye."

The humorous writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for February 1738, to whom we have already referred, maintains that Hot-Cockles and More Sacks to the Mill certainly originated in the period of national darkness, "when the laity were hoodwinked and a parcel of monks were saddling their backs and bastinadoing them." The Chytrinda of the Greeks, Arbuthnot writes, assuredly is not our Hot-Cockles, for that was by pinching, not by striking, though good authors affirm the Rathapygismus to be yet nearer the modern game. However," my son Martin may use either of them indifferently, they being equally antique."

HUNT THE SLIPPER.

This enduringly popular game is noticed in the Pleasures of Memory of Samuel Rogers

""Twas here we chas'd the slipper by its sound."

LOGGATS.

Loggats is the ancient title of a game enumerated as unlawful in the thirty-third Statute of Henry VIII. A stake being fixed in the ground, the players threw loggats, or bone pins at it, and he who threw nearest to it won. Steevens testifies to having seen it played in different countries at sheep-shearing feasts, when the winner was entitled to a black fleece, which he afterwards presented to the farmer's maid to be spun into a petticoat, on the condition of her kneeling down on the fleece to be kissed by all the rustics present. There is a reference to the pastime in Hamlet-"Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggats with them?" The fact of its not being included in former Acts against "new and crafty games and plays" may be accepted as evidence of its novelty at the time the Statute of Henry VIII. was passed.

Blount, in his annotations in Shakespeare, speaks of a loggat

ground being, like a skittle-ground, strewed with ashes, but more extensive. The bowl, he says, is much larger than the jack in the game of bowls; and the pins or loggats are much thinner than those used in the corresponding game, and lighter at one extremity than at the other. The bowl being thrown first, the players take up the pins, which are two and twenty inches long, by the thinner and lighter end, and fling them towards the bowl, in such manner that they may revolve in the air once and slide towards the object with the thinner extremity foremost.

MARBLES

Doubtless originated in bowls, and derived their name from the substance of which bowls formerly were made. Taw is with us the common designation of this game. Marbles have mention in Rogers' Pleasures of Memory

"On yon grey stone that fronts the chancel-door,

Worn smooth by busy feet, now seen no more,
Each eve we shot the marble through the ring."

It is gratifying to learn that, notwithstanding his injunctions regarding playthings of primitive and simple antiquity, Scriblerus condescended to allow his son Martin the use of a few modern ones, such as might benefit his mind by imparting early notions of science. Even as nutcrackers taught him the use of the lever, swinging on the ends of a board the balance, bottlescrews the vice, whirligigs the axis and peritrochia, bird-cages the pulley, and tops centrifugal motion, he found that "marbles taught him percussion and the laws of motion." It will not be amiss here to add that bob-cherry was reckoned useful, since it taught "at once two noble virtues, patience and constancy; the first in adhering to the pursuit of one end, the latter in bearing disappointment.

MERITOT.

(Called in the North of England Shuggy-Shew.)

Speght's Glossary to Chaucer explains that it was a sport indulged in by children, who swung themselves in bell-ropes, or such like, till they were giddy. The rope we call the swing, but formerly it was known by the name of Meritot or Merry-trotter. Far from being restricted to juveniles, however, in the last century it was practised by grown-up members of both sexes, especially rustics. Hence Gay

"On two near elms the slacken'd cord I hung;
Now high, now low, my Blouzalinda swung.'

And Rogers also adverts to it

"Soar'd in the swing, half pleased and half afraid,
Thro' sister-elms that waved their summer shade."

People of fashion adopted it at watering-places, and the innovation provoked the righteous ridicule of the Spectator.