EXHIBITION
WHEN I watched Miss Mollie Hide's team of women cricketers 'laying the men of Haslemere on June 18th, I thought how smart they looked in their white skirts and stockings and how thoroughly they had mastered all the branches of the game (though they seemed most at a disadvantage in bowling). They were quite unlike the uncouth hoydens portrayed .by Rowlandson in his caricature of a match between the Ladies of Hampshire and the Ladies of Surrey in 1811, which is to be seen at the exhibition of cricket books, manuscripts and " pictorial records " on view at the National Book League's headquarters, 7 Albemarle Street, until August 12th. I should have been content, in my innocence, to consider Miss Hide a pioneer (as indeed she may well be in the matter of efficiency), but I now find that even Rowlandson's blowsy ladies of 1811 had been anticipated by twenty-two " maids " of Bramley and Hamble- Jon as early as 1745. This is only one of several surprises that await any visitor to Albemarle Street viito has hitherto failed to appreciate the extent to which the game of cricket is involved in our social history. It has, in. fact, been played, as a boys' game, since 1550 ; and here is the manuscript of the Guildford Book of Tourt for January 16th, 1598, with the earliest specific reference to cricket in English, the evidence of a man of fifty-nine that as a boy at the Free School in Guildford he " did runne and play :here at Creckett and other plaies " Here are William Goldwin's Latin verses of 1706, Musae Juveniles, containing the first descrip- tion of a match ; and here also is much other interesting matter :oncerning the history of the game. The exhibition has drawn largely on the collection formed by the M.C.C., and has been well arranged by Diana Rait Kerr, Thrator of the Library at Lord's ; it is documented in an instructive :atalogue—itself an item in cricket literature—published by the 2ambridge University Press (5s.). Besides sections on the history and conduct of the game, there are sections on Cricket in the British isles, Cricket Overseas, International Cricket and Cricket in Literature—a department in which Blake and Byron, Dickens and Tom Hughes, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Hood and Mr. Blunden all unite gracefully, though I missed Praed's essay on " The Best Bat in the School." Books are the foundation of the exhibition. There is perhaps a limit to the excitement to be derived, even by !rathusiasts, from peering through a glass case at displayed volumes entitled How We Recovered the Ashes, Defending the Ashes or fn, Quest of the Ashes, but the stern bibliography of the game is varied by some intriguing items—a manuscript of Andrew Lang's on the " Yorker," Arthur Haygarth's announcement of his own death intended for the Editor of Cricket ("All is over. A. H.") or the England XI of 1847 on a handkerchief. Best of all are the paintings and drawings, among them pleasant works by Morland and Hayman, drawings by Watts and sketches of Tom Lord and others by George Shepheard. The catalogue reprodubes some of the pictures, but fails to provide a systematic record of them, which is a mistake. It might have told us. for instance, that a painting of a game at Gad's Hill shows Dickens bowling the first ball in a charity match, a fact revealed only to the keen-sighted who can read the artist's minute inscription.
In the literary section I looked in vain for a work'that might be entitled "Cricket in its Moral and Religious Aspect." I am not being sarcastic. The ancient summer ritual is a very suitable subject for a philos6pher-psychologist, provided he does not take himself,
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