MUSS.

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra has an allusion to this ancient puerile sport

"When I cried Ho!

Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth,
And cry, Your will!"

Ben Jonson's Magnetic Lady contains a similar allusion to it in the sense of a scramble; and Rabelais mentions it as among Gargantua's games.

NINE MEN'S MORRIS, OR MERRILS.

Shakespeare's reference to this pastime in the Midsummer Night's Dream

"The nine Men's Morris is fill'd up with mud,"

is explained by Dr Farmer thus. In that part of Warwickshire in which the poet was educated, and in the adjoining parts of Northamptonshire, shepherds and other youths were wont to dig up the turf with their knives to represent a sort of imperfect chessboard, consisting of a square which ranged from a foot in diameter to three or four yards. Within this was a second square, with sides parallel to the external square; the two squares being connected by lines drawn || from each corner of both, and the middle of each line. One party, or player had wooden pegs, and the other stones, which they moved so as to take up each other's men, as they called them; and the area of the interior square was termed the pound, in which the men taken up were impounded. Those figures, which they always cut upon the green turf (or leys) or upon the grass bordering ploughed lands, the rustic folk called Nine Men's Morris, or merrils, from the circumstance of each set of players having nine men ; and in rainy weather they never failed to be choked up with mud.

Alchorne, another Shakespearian commentator, refers to it as a game most popular with shepherds, cow-keepers, and similar folk in the midland counties. A figure, he says, of squares one within another is made on the ground by cutting out the turf, and two persons take each nine stones, which they place by turns in the angles, and then move alternately as at chess or draughts. He who is enabled to play three in a straight line takes off any one of his adversary's at any point he pleases, and the game is terminated by one of the players losing all his men.

It may be useful to explain these explanations of the commentators. The sports at every angle and intersection of the lines in the square are the places for laying the pieces or men upon, and the mode of playing is briefly this:-Two persons, having each of them nine pieces, lay them down alternately, one by one, upon the spots; and the concern of either is to prevent his antagonist from placing three of his pieces so as to form a row of three without the intervention of an opponent piece.

Tollet quotes Cotgrave's Dictionary to explain that there was a

juvenile game called Merils, or Five-penny Morris, played here most commonly with stones, but in France with pawns made for the purpose, which were termed merelles; the designation Morris or Merelles perhaps originating from their black colour, even as we still continue to call a black cherry a morello, and a small black cherry a merry, from Maurus, a Moor, or rather from morum, a mulberry.

The Feu de Merelles, according to Douce, was also a table game ; and there is a representation of two monkeys engaged in this amusement in a German edition of Petrach "De remedio utriusque fortunæ," the cuts to which were executed in 1520. The game was sometimes called Nine Men's Merrils, Douce writes, from merelles or mereaux, an old French word for the counters used in playing it; the other term, morris, probably being a corruption suggested by the dance, as it were, which the counters executed in the course of the game. In the French mode of the game each party had only three counters, which required to be placed in a line to win the game. Hyde opines that Morris, or Merrils, was a pastime familiar to our ancestors from the time of the Normans, and that the name was subsequently corrupted into Three Men's Morals, or Nine Men's Morals; and he adds that it was likewise called Nine-penny or Nine-pin Miracle, Three-penny Morris, Five-penny Morris, Nine-penny Morris, or three-pin, five-pin, and nine-pin Morris, severally corruptions of "Merels."

NINE-HOLES.

We have mention of this boyish game as early as the opening of the seventeenth century. Herrick (1648) has this reference to it in an Epigram upon Raspe

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Raspe playes at nine-holes; and 'tis known he gets
Many a teaster by his game, and bets:

But of his gettings there's but little sign,

When one hole wastes more than he gets by nine."

NINE-PINS.

In Urquhart's Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel (1651) occurs an allusion in the course of a passage upon cards: "They may likewise be said to use their king as the players at Nine-pins do the middle kyle, which they call the king, at whose fall alone they aim, the sooner to obtain the gaining of their prize;" and Poor Robin's Almanac for 1695 notes that in the Spring quarter are very much practised the commendable exercises of Nine-pins, Pigeon-holes, Stool-ball, and Barley-break, by reason Easter holidays, Whitsun holidays and May day do fall in this quarter."

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PALL-MALL.

In a dialogue contained in The French Garden (1621) the lady says: "If one had paille mails, it were good to play in this alley, for it is of a reasonable good length, straight, and even;" a marginal note explaining that a paille mail is a wooden hammer affixed to the end of a

long staff to strike a bowl with, and that the game was popular with the nobility and gentry in France. Cotgrave's French Dictionary represents it to be a game in which a round box-ball is struck with a mallet through a high arch of iron; the victory being gained by him who can accomplish the feat with the fewest blows or within a number previously agreed upon. It is to be noted that there were two arches, one at either end of the alley. In the reign of Charles II. it was a fashionable amusement, and the walk in St James's Park, called the Mall, derived its name from the circumstance of its having been appropriated to the playing of the game there by the monarch and his courtiers. The wooden mallet wherewith the players struck the ball evidently gave its denomination to the game.

PEARIE.

Jamieson defines it as the Scotch equivalent of the English peg-top; the name apparently being derived from its close similitude to a pear. From its original importation from France the English humming-top is in Scotland denominated a "French pearie."

PICCADILLY OR PICARDILLY

Is mentioned as a game in Flecknoe's Epigrams—

"And their lands to coyn they distil ye,

And then with the money

You see how they run ye

To loose it at Piccadilly."

A species of ruff was also so called. In Rich's Honestie of this Age (1615) we read

"But he that saw forty or fifty yeares sithens should have asked a pickadilly, I wonder who could have understood him, or could have told what a pickadilly had bin, either fish or flesh."

PRICKING AT THE BELT OR GIRDLE; also called FAST AND LOOSE,

This was a cheating game widely patronised by the gipsies in the time of Shakespeare. A leather belt was made up into a number of intricate folds and set edgeways upon a table; one of the folds being made to represent the middle of the belt, so as to lead one to believe that a skewer thrust into it would affix it to the table, whereas it might be drawn away by both ends being taken up.

PRISONERS' BARS; otherwise PRISONERS' BASE.

Mention of this sport occurs in the proclamations heading Parliamentary proceedings early in the reign of Edward III., wherein it is designated a childish amusement, and prohibited to be played in the avenues of the Palace of Westminster during the sitting of Parliament, because of the interruption it occasioned to members and others is

passing to and fro as their business required. Shakespeare speaks of it in Cymbeline as a boyish game

"He with two striplings, lads more like to run

The country Base than to commit such slaughter,
Made good the passage.'

It was most assuredly, however, played by the men, especially in Cheshire and other adjoining counties, where in former times it apparently was in high repute. In the tragedy of Hoffman (1632) we read

"I'll run a little course At Base or Barley-brake;"

in the Antipodes (1638)

"My men can run at Base;"

and in the 30th song of Drayton's Polyolbion

“At Hood-wink, Barley-brake, at Tick, or Prison Base."

Spenser, in the Faery Queene (1590), it should be added, also adverts to it"So ran they all as they had been at Bace."

RACES.

Misson records the great delight taken by the English nobility in horse-races. The most famous, he writes, are usually at Newmarket, where very many of the first quality and almost all the gentlemen of the neighbourhood are to be found; wagers of two thousand pounds upon a race being "pretty common.' The same traveller notes that races were run also by men.

In Hinde's Life of the celebrated puritan John Bruen, the sporting members of society are exhorted to give up "their foot-races and their horse-races."

DIVERSION OF THE RING.

Misson, referring to Hyde Park as being "at the end of one of the suburbs of London," writes of the people of fashion there taking "the diversion of the Ring;" which he proceeds to say consisted in the coaches driving round and round a circumference of two or three hundred paces in diameter, marked off by "a sorry kind of ballustrade, or rather poles placed upon stakes," but three feet from the ground. "When they have turn'd for some time round one way, they face about and turn t'other: so rowls the world."

The same name was given to another diversion in Scotland. The Statistical Account (1796) has it that in Perthshire, by way of preventing the intemperance to which social meetings were prone, they spent the evening in public competitions of dexterity or skill; of which Riding at the Ring (said to be an amusement of ancient and warlike origin) was the chief. Two perpendicular posts were erected with a cross-beam, from which was suspended a small ring; and the task of

the competitors who were on horseback and severally provided with a pointed rod, was to pass between the posts at full gallop and carry off the ring on the rod.

RUFF.

A passage in Heath's House of Correction (1619), "A swaggerer is one that plays at Ruffe, from whence he tooke the denomination of a Ruffyn," attests the antiquity of the game. Heywood's Woman killed with Kindness (1607) mentions it; the proposal being to play it with honours; and the Complete Gamester (1674) specifies double ruff and English ruff with honours, and as contradistinguished from French ruff.

RUNNING THE FIGURE EIGHT.

To this popular sport Shakespeare has an allusion in the Midsummer Night's Dream

"And the quaint mazes in the wanton green."

SCOTCH AND ENGLISH.

Writing of the incessant irruptions made upon each other's territory, by the inhabitants of the English and Scotch borders, in days antecedent to the union of the two kingdoms, Hutton, in his History of the Roman Wall (1804), observes that the lively impression of former scenes did not fade away with the practice, "for the children of this day, upon the English border, keep up the remembrance by a common play called Scotch and English, or the Raid; that is to say, the Inroad." The details are given. The village lads selected from their number two captains, each of whom nominated alternately one out of the little tribe. Dividing into two parties, they stripped and deposited their clothes, called Wad, in two heaps severally upon their own territory, which, to mark the division of the two kingdoms, was divided by a stone. The mutual invasion of territory then ensued, the English cry being "Here's a leap into thy land, dry-bellied Scot ;" and plunder was the order of the day. When one was apprehended by the enemy, he became a prisoner, and could not be released except by his own party. Thus one side sometimes took all the men and property of the

other.

This apparently is identical with the game described by Jamieson in his Etymological Dictionary under the name of "Wads;" which, in the Glossary to Sibbald's Chronicle of Scottish Poetry, is defined to be "a youthful amusement wherein much use is made of pledges." Wad. says Jamieson, is equivalent to vadium of lower Latinity. In Lye (Junii Etymologicon), we read: Wad Scoti dicunt pro Wed pactum : and Wed is rendered pactum, sponsio; A., S. ped est pignus vel pactum, ac peculiarr acceptione pactum sponsalitium, vel dos. Hence, we may add, our word "wedding" for a marriage.