CHESS.
I.
It is rather difficult for the spectator at a game of chess (who is not himself a player) to comprehend the pleasure of it, and to believe that those two grave, silent individuals are not only seeking but actually finding amusement and recreation.
Yet no game is more beautiful in its appointments; beautiful in the mathematical precision of its moves; beautiful in its colored, carved, and varied pieces; intellectually beautiful in its very quietude—in the power with which it represses every manifestation of hope or disappointment, in its wordless intensity of thought.
Other games come in some degree within the scope of the most humble capacity; but chess, royal chess, loftier in its requirements, demands the most noble. It has attractions all-absorbing and fascinating as well as profitable unto wisdom; but they stand fully revealed to him only who can widely plan and steadily execute; whose circumspection is never beguiled and whose caution never sleepeth; who is elated not overmuch by success nor despondent under disasters; who keepeth his own counsel and can baffle an opponent's penetration; whose well-schooled eye gives no clue, by a glance, to his intended victim, and whose well-trained finger never hovers in irresolution. Behold the requirements of chess!
It has been justly called in olden English The Royalle Game; for not only is a king its hero, but it has afforded amusement to kings and warriors through many a past age, and in countries widely distant from each other.
The origin of the game of chess is still an unsettled question. Like some of the oriental monarchs, it might write itself "brother to the sun and moon"—so ancient is its pedigree. Some writers have proved, to their own satisfaction at least, that it was chess which enlivened the tedium of the Greeks encamped about the walls of Troy, and that its inventor was Palamedes, son of Nauplius, King of Eubœa. Who can doubt the inventive genius of Palamedes after all the tales told of him?—tales we learn once and then forget. I repeat one. When the Greek heroes were gathering for the mighty Trojan conflict, Palamedes, himself a warrior, was sent to Ithaca, to summon Achilles and Odysseus to join them. The latter, desirous of evading the call, feigned himself insane, and Palamedes, to test his truthfulness, seized his infant child and laid it before him in a furrow which he was ploughing. Odysseus paused, raised the child, and removed it, thus giving evidence of his sanity. Who after this can doubt the inventive powers of Palamedes or his historian, and who can say that either might not have invented chess?
In a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the Harleian collection, in the British Museum, is a drawing in which two warriors are represented, evidently Greeks, with a chess-board between them, engaged in play. The author of the MS. traces the game back to Odysseus, and concludes that one of these chiefs is intended for him.
In the great Egyptian collection of the British Museum, specimens are preserved of a kind of chess-men taken from a tomb of one of the Pharaohs, which prove that they had a game similar if not identical with our chess; and some hieroglyphics on the ruins of Luxor, Thebes, and Palmyra have been interpreted as indicating such a game.
Caxton, who printed a Boke of Chesse in 1474, quoting from some other writers, gives a wonderful story, showing that it was devised in the reign of Evil-Merodach, King of Babylon, by a philosopher "whyche was named in Caldee Exerses, and in Greke Philemetor." The Greek cognomen of the philosopher leads somewhat to the belief of such a possibility.