“England, when once of peace and wealth possessed, Began to think frugality a jest; So grew polite: hence all her well-bred heirs Gamesters and jockeys turned, and _cricket_-players.”
However, we are happy to say that even among comparatively modern authors we have beaten Strutt in his researches by twenty-five years; for Edward Phillips, John Milton’s nephew, in his “Mysteries of Love and Eloquence” (8vo. 1685), writes thus:--
“Will you not, when you have me, throw stocks at my head and cry, ‘Would my eyes had been beaten out of my head with a _cricket-ball_ the day before I saw thee?’”
We shall presently show the word Cricket, in Richelet, as early as the year 1680.
A late author has very sensibly remarked that Cricket could not have been popular in the days of Elizabeth, or we should expect to find allusions to that game, as to tennis, foot-ball, and other sports, in the early poets; but Shakspeare and the dramatists who followed, he observes, are silent on the subject.
As to the silence of the early poets and dramatists on the game of cricket--and no one conversant with English literature would expect to find it except in some casual allusion or illustration in an old play--this silence we can confirm on the best authority. What if we presumed to advance that the early dramatists, one and all, ignore the very name of cricket. How bold a negative! So rare are certain old plays that a hundred pounds have been paid by the Duke of Devonshire for a single copy of a few loose and soiled leaves; and shall we pretend to have dived among such hidden stores? We are so fortunate as to be favoured with the assistance of the Rev. John Mitford and our loving cousin John Payne Collier, two English scholars, most deeply versed in early literature, and no bad judges of cricket; and since these two scholars have never met with any mention of cricket in the early dramatists, nor in any author earlier than 1685, there is, indeed, much reason to believe that “Cricket” is a word that does not occur in any English author before the year 1685.
But though it occurs not in any English author, is it found in no rare manuscript yet unpublished? We shall see.
Now as regards the silence of the early poets, a game like cricket might certainly exist without falling in with the allusions or topics of poetical writers. Still, if we actually find distinct catalogues and enumerations of English games before the date of 1685, and Cricket is omitted, the suspicion that Cricket was not then the popular name of one of the many games of ball (not that the game itself was positively unknown) is strongly confirmed.