Brawny bat-gripping hands, and crisp-curled beard
As black as Vulcan's own.
CRICKETANA: YOUNG LADIES v. BOYS
Fair Batter (ætat. 18): "Now, just look here, Algy Jones—none of your Patronage! You dare to Bowl to me with your Left Hand again, and I'll Box your Ears!"
Two Views of Lord's
In 1888 when Grace made 215 runs at Brighton Punch saluted him as "my black-bearded, cricketing Titan," and in 1889 he figures in a fancy portrait as "The Leviathan Bat" with scores on his wings. From 1880 onwards notices of matches abound; Eton and Harrow, and the Canterbury Week in 1881, and in 1882 Southey is laid under contribution to celebrate the "famous victory" of Australia at the Oval with Spofforth as hero of the occasion. Surrey v. Notts in 1887 inspires a column of verses from an enthusiastic Surreyite with due praise of W. W. Read, K. J. Key and the exhilarating and intrepid George Lohmann. But even in these years Punch had his moments of misgiving, his cold as well as his hot fits. The lines professing to bewail the feminine invasion of man's last stronghold in pastime—cricket—in 1884, are facetious, or semi-ironical. Women had competed in croquet, roller-skating and lawn tennis, and man had successively yielded these various fields of pastime, hoping to retain the mastery of the cricket field, now threatened. But the verses on "Lord's" in the same year contain a serious and even ponderous indictment of the fetish-worship of athleticism, "the Muscle-Cultus forced into a fever," with a lurid portrait of the "adipose Old Blue," and the decline of the popular compiler of centuries into that "unvirile vaurien a Town-dangler" with no profession, no intellectual resources, no interests save his own past. Yet in the very next year Punch glorified Lord's in an illustration of the Pavilion crowded with portraits of cricketing celebrities—"W. G.," I. D. Walker, A. J. Webbe, Lord Harris, A. P. Lucas, C. J. Thornton, Alfred Lyttelton, A. G. Steel, C. T. Studd, etc. Whether this was intended as an amende or not, I cannot say, but it was certainly a considerable advertisement.
LAWN TENNIS UNDER DIFFICULTIES—"PLAY?"
If space is limited, there is no reason why one shouldn't play with one's next-door neighbours, over the garden wall. (One needn't visit them, you know.)