Lord F. Beauclerk was now one of the best players of his day; as also were the Hon. H. and I. Tufton. They frequently headed a division of the Marylebone, or some county club, against Middlesex, and sometimes Hampstead and Highgate.
In this year (1798) these gentlemen aforesaid made the first attempt at a match between the Gentlemen and the Players; and on this first occasion the players won; though when we mention that the Gentlemen had three players given, and also that T. Walker, Beldham, and Hammond were the three, certainly it was like playing England, “the part of England being left out by particular desire.”
Kent attacked England in 1798, but, being beaten in about half an innings, we find the Kentish men in 1800, though still hankering after the same cosmopolitan distinction, modestly accept the odds of nineteen, and afterwards twenty-three, men to twelve.
The chief patronage, and consequently the chief practice, in cricket, was beyond all comparison in London. There, the play was nearly all professional: even the gentlemen made a profession of it; and therefore, though cricket was far more extensively spread throughout the villages of Kent than of Middlesex, the clubs of the metropolis figure in the score books as defying all competition. Professional players, we may observe, have always a decided advantage in respect of judicious choice and mustering their best men. The best eleven on the side of the Players is almost always known, and can be mustered on a given day. Favour, friendship, and etiquette interfere but little with their election; but the eleven gentlemen of England are less easy to muster,—
“Linquenda Parish et domus et placens
Uxor,”—
and they are never anything more than the best eleven known to the party who make the match. Besides, by the time an amateur is at his best, he has duties which bid him retire.
Having now traced the rise and progress of the game from the time of its general establishment to the time that Beldham had shown us the full powers of the bat, and Lord Frederick had (as Fennex always declared) formed his style upon Beldham’s; and since now we approach the era of a new school, and the forward play of Fennex,—which his father termed an innovation and presumption “contrary to all experience,”—till the same forward play was proved effectual by Lambert, and Hammond had shown that, in spite of wicket keepers, bowling, if uniformly slow, might be met and hit away at the pitch;—now, we will wait to characterise, in the words of eye-witnesses, the heroes of the contests already mentioned.
On “the Old Players” I may be brief; because, the few old gentlemen (with one of whom I am in daily communication) who have heard even the names of the Walkers, Frame, Small, and David Harris, are passing away, full of years, and almost all the written history of the Old Players consists in undiscriminating scores.
In point of style the Old Players did not play the steady game, with maiden overs, as at present. The defensive was comparatively unknown: both the bat and the wicket, and the style of bowling too, were all adapted to a short life and a merry one. The wooden substitute for a ball, as in Cat and Dog, before described, evidently implied a hitting, and not a stopping game.