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The English Cricketers

[To the Editor, the Press, February 15th, 1864.]

Sir—The following lines, which profess to have been written by a friend of mine at three o’clock in the morning after the dinner of Wednesday last, have been presented to myself with a request that I should forward them to you. I would suggest to the writer of them the following quotation from “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

  I am, Sir,
    Your obedient servant,
      S.B.

“You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent; let me supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified; but for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. … Imitari is nothing. So doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider.”

  Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act IV, S. 2.

Horatio. …
… The whole town rose
Eyes out to meet them; in a car of state
The Mayor and all the Councillors rode down
To give them greeting, while the blue-eyed team
Drawn in Cobb’s glittering chariot of pure gold
Careered it from the station.—But the Mayor—Thou
shouldst have seen the blandness of the man,
And watched the effulgent and unspeakable smiles
With which he beamed upon them.
His beard, by nature tawny, was suffused
page 200 With just so much of a most reverend grizzle
That youth and age should kiss in’t. I assure you
He was a Southern Palmerston, so old
In understanding, yet jocund and jaunty
As though his twentieth summer were as yet
But in the very June o’ the year, and winter
Was never to be dreamt of. Those who heard
His words stood ravished. It was all as one
As though Minerva, hid in Mercury’s jaws,
Had counselled some divinest utterance
Of honeyed wisdom. So profound, so true,
So meet for the occasion, and so—short.
The king sat studying rhetoric as he spoke,
While the lord Abbot heaved half-envious sighs
And hung suspended on his accents.
Claud. But will it pay, Horatio?
Hor. Let Shylock see to that, but yet I trust
He’s no great loser.
Claud. Which side went in first?
Hor. We did,
And scored a paltry thirty runs in all.
The lissom Lockyer gambolled round the stumps
With many a crafty curvet: you had thought
An Indian rubber monkey were endued
With wicket-keeping instincts; teazing Tinley
Issued his treacherous notices to quit,
Ruthlessly truthful to his fame, and who
Shall speak of Jackson? Oh! ’twas sad indeed
To watch the downcast faces of our men
Returning from the wickets; one by one,
Like patients at the gratis consultation
Of some skilled leech, they took their turn at physic.
And each came sadly homeward with a face
page 201 Awry through inward anguish; they were pale
As ghosts of some dead but deep mourned love,
Grim with a great despair, but forced to smile.
Claud. Poor souls! Th’ unkindest heart had bled for them.
But what came after?
Hor. Fortune turned her wheel,
And Grace, disgraced for the nonce, was bowled
First ball, and all the welkin roared applause!
As for the rest, they scored a goodly score
And showed some splendid cricket, but their deeds
Were not colossal, and our own brave Tennant
Proved himself all as good a man as they.

* * * * * *

Through them we greet our Mother. In their coming,
We shake our dear old England by the hand
And watch space dwindling, while the shrinking world
Collapses into nothing. Mark me well,
Matter as swift as swiftest thought shall fly,
And space itself be nowhere. Future Tinleys
Shall bowl from London to our Christ Church Tennants,
And all the runs for all the stumps be made
In flying baskets which shall come and go
And do the circuit round about the globe
Within ten seconds. Do not check me with
The roundness of the intervening world,
The winds, the mountain ranges, and the seas -
These hinder nothing; for the leathern sphere,
Like to a planetary satellite,
Shall wheel its faithful orb and strike the bails
Clean from the centre of the middle stump.

* * * * * *

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Mirrors shall hang suspended in the air,
Fixed by a chain between two chosen stars,
And every eye shall be a telescope
To read the passing shadows from the world.
Such games shall be hereafter, but as yet
We lay foundations only.
Claud. Thou must be drunk, Horatio.
Hor. So I am.