Horse-racing. That this diversion was in Shakespeare’s day occasionally practised in the spirit of the modern turf is evident from “Cymbeline” (iii. 2):
“I have heard of riding wagers,
Where horses have been nimbler than the sands
That run i’ the clock’s behalf.”
Burton,[799] too, who wrote at the close of the Shakespearian era, mentions the ruinous consequences of this recreation: “Horse races are desports of great men, and good in themselves, though many gentlemen by such means gallop quite out of their fortunes.”
Leap-frog. One boy stoops down with his hands upon his knees, and others leap over him, every one of them running forward and stooping in his turn. It is mentioned by Shakespeare in “Henry V.” (v. 2), where he makes the king say, “If I could win a lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting into my saddle with my armour on my back, ... I should quickly leap into a wife.” Ben Jonson, in his comedy of “Bartholomew Fair,” speaks of “a leappe frogge chance note.”
Laugh-and-lie-down (more properly laugh-and-lay-down) was a game at cards, to which there is an allusion in the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (ii. 1):
“Emilia.I could laugh now.
Waiting-woman. I could lie down, I’m sure.”
Loggat. The game so called resembles bowls, but with notable differences.[800] First, it is played, not on a green, but on a floor strewed with ashes. The jack is a wheel of lignum vitæ, or other hard wood, nine inches in diameter, and three or four inches thick. The loggat, made of apple-wood, is a truncated cone, twenty-six or twenty-seven inches in length, tapering from a girth of eight and a half to nine inches at one end to three and a half or four inches at the other. Each player has three loggats, which he throws, holding lightly the thin end. The object is to lie as near the jack as possible. Hamlet speaks of this game (v. 1): “Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ’em?” comparing, perhaps, the skull to the jack at which the bones were thrown. In Ben Jonson’s “Tale of a Tub” (iv. 5) we read:
“Now are they tossing of his legs and arms,
Like loggats at a pear-tree.”
Sir Thomas Hanmer makes the game the same as nine-pins or skittles. He says: “It is one of the unlawful games enumerated in the Thirty-third statute of Henry VIII.;[801] it is the same which is now called kittle-pins, in which the boys often make use of bones instead of wooden pins, throwing at them with another bone instead of bowling.”