The papers have been full of a grand cricket-match, played
:at the Kennington Oval between the All England Eleven and a -team from Australia, who have been very successful against many English cricket-clubs. This time the Australians were beaten, though not ignominiously, and in the absence of their best bowler. The scores reached in this game seem to show that the batting, in first-rate hands, is beating the bowling, which demands more skill, more practice, and more of a steadily persistent temper. The interest of the affair for us, however, lies in the public excitement it created. Cricket is not, and never has been, a sport of the people, many circum- stances now combining to make it costly ; yet it is believed that 70,000 persons witnessed this contest, standing for hours in a packed crowd under a hot sun. So large was the amount of gate-money taken, that it is said the Australians, who only receive half, net above 21,400. In fact, so wide is now the diffusion of the taste for the game, that it pays a dozen or more Australian players to travel half round the world, play for six months, and return, merely to obtain a share of the shillings paid by the spectators. Cricket is a fine game, greatly to be encouraged ; but somehow, sport on this gigantic scale, players from the Antipodes, entire cities-full for spectators, re- ports in large type and three columns long, fortunes paid in gate- money, excite in us feelings of anything but admiration. Still, games of cricket are far beyond those " feats of endurance " which attract such crowds, in which tortured pedestrians, half dead with fatigue and want of sleep and foot-sores, plod for clays or weeks round a covered course, with no goal and no object, except to ascertain the point at which men could commit suicide by walking.
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