It is remarkable that so simple a diversion could have been popular with generation after generation of British young folk, and that they should apparently recall it with so much interest in later years. Verily, our forefathers in the old country were easily amused.
In Antony and Cleopatra (iii. 13. 91) we find an allusion to another game equally simple—if, indeed, it be not too simple to be called a game. Antony says:—
"Authority melts from me; of late, when I cried 'Ho!'
Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth
And cry 'Your will?'"
A "muss" was merely a scramble for small coins or other things thrown down to be taken by those who could seize them. Ben Jonson, in The Magnetic Lady (iv. 1), says:—
"The moneys rattle not, nor are they thrown
To make a muss yet 'mong the gamesome suitors";
In the same author's Bartholomew Fair (iv. 1), when the costard-monger's basket of pears is overturned, Cokes begins to scramble for them, crying, "Ods so! a muss, a muss, a muss, a muss!"