JOSEPH STRUTT, the first writer to deal historically with the sports and pastimes of this country, begins by saying that in order to form a just estimation of the character of any particular people, it is absolutely necessary to investigate the sports and pastimes most generally prevalent among them.' That That the national

character is reflected in the national speech is equally true, and, conversely, it may be said that the figurative element of the language is a certain clue to the habits, tastes, and pursuits of the people speaking it. For nine tenths of language is metaphor, sometimes fossil, sometimes most living. If we suppose that some ethnologist of the far-distant future, attempting to reconstruct the characteristics of the English race, were wise enough to call in the assistance of the philologist, what would the latter be able to tell him? I think he would say "These records appear to belong to a race which, besides possessing the common stock of international metaphor drawn from the key industries of primitive man (hunting, weaving, agriculture, and so forth), must have been particularly addicted to navigation, horsemanship and all forms of sport. They seem to have had a positive mania for hunting, and they certainly much preferred play to work.'

That there is such a thing as national metaphor I think all will grant. The English language has a salt smack. The most stay-at-home Midlander who has never seen the sea can hardly

get through the day without using some figure of speech dating back to the Elizabethan seamen, perhaps even to the Vikings. But our nautical metaphor is another story. Hebrew metaphor, with its constant allusions to vegetation and fresh water, the vine and the fig-tree, reflects the preoccupations of a race doomed to wring a scanty existence from the hostile desert. American metaphor, young and sprightly, as befits a young and sprightly nation, tells of the struggle with the primeval forest, the railway, which is man's great helper in that struggle, and the quest for mineral

treasure.

In the language of the United States 'to be stumped' is to come up against an insuperable obstacle, like the settler whose plough is suddenly arrested by a root left in the forest clearing. 'Logrolling' reminds us of the communal effort required in building the backwoods settlement, when 'You roll my log and I'll roll yours' expressed readiness to help for a consideration. The American prefers 'to side-track' (in English 'to shunt') anything that hinders progress, and, if unsucessful in one direction, promptly 'switches. on' to another. The lucky adventurer 'strikes oil': the unlucky one may pursue his fruitless quest 'down to the bedrock.' Such phrases and figures belong to the youth of a nation.

on' to another.

A mature race like our own does not easily create new metaphors. Those engaged in a special craft or trade may use its technicalities figuratively among

themselves, just as Mr. P. G. Wodehouse's entertaining young men take their imagery from billiards, the motorcar, the bridge table, and the golf links; but such figures of speech do not readily establish themselves in the everyday language of the people. Our stock of metaphor has been handed down to us from ancestors more or less remote, and it takes some such convulsion as a World War to make any noticeable addition to it.

Some think that Englishmen play too much. My own humble opinion is that they now play too little. The grand old tradition contained in the word 'fair-play,' a word untranslatable into any language I am acquainted with, was not created by watching the skill and agility of twenty-two expensive Scotsmen, but by giving and taking hard knocks, the only way of learning to 'play the game'-another untranslatable phrase. Foreign races, especially those afflicted with excessive acuteness, look on, pityingly, at our devotion to sport, and put us down for a stupid race. No doubt they are right. We are stupid. It is even said that we have not sufficient mental alertness to know when we are beaten. I suppose there is no accusation which so rankles with the average Englishman as that of 'unsportsmanlike' behavior, and the Prince of Wales expressed a genuinely national ideal when, in a speech made last year, he said that 'every child born in the country should have a sporting chance.'

A great deal of our sporting metaphor is not exclusively English. This applies especially to the indoor type of game. Of such games, I suppose some form of dicing is as old as any. The obvious 'the die is cast' is traditionally ascribed to Julius Cæsar crossing the

Rubicon. Less obvious is the use of 'it falls out' for 'it happens,' originally referring to the fall of the dice. The word 'hazard,' now of such wide connotation, is said by a contemporary of the Crusades to have been the name of a castle in Palestine at which a new game of chance was invented, and the word 'chance' itself, which is Old French for 'fall,' is another early legacy from the dice-box, though the exact meaning of the 'main chance' is obscure. We now usually associate 'aces' with cards, but they were originally the single pips on dice, a fact of which we are reminded by the common expression 'within an ace of,' and by the use of 'the deuce!' to express the dismay of the gambler who has thrown the double ace. Our modern 'at sixes and sevens' appears to have been evolved, with an obscure transformation of sense, from the mediæval 'to set our six and seven,' which in Chaucer means something like 'to go nap.' It is even probable that no great shakes, was originally applied to an unproductive throw of the dice.

Of equal antiquity with dice is 'chess,' a word which is really the plural of 'check,' which in its turn represents the Persian shah (king). The simple metaphor derived from the chess-board has long been used with special reference to warfare 'Check'

for a repulse, and 'stale-mate' for a position in which neither side can take the initiative, were commonly used during the Great War, as they had been used long before. Not all of us perhaps realize that when we 'check' a man's accounts, or forestall his possible dishonesty by paying him with a 'cheque,' we are also using chess-board chess-board language; or that the

royal 'exchequer' was once the board marked out in squares on which the chancellor kept the royal accounts.

A very popular board game with those who were too godly for dice and too stupid for chess or backgammon, which in Old French was called 'reversier,' and in Dutch is 'verkeerspel,' that is, turn-game. In English it was also called 'tables,' from the two folding leaves of which the backgammon board was composed. I am not acquainted with the technicalities of the game, so cannot explain exactly what is meant by the familiar expression to 'turn the tables on' an adversary. The obsolete game of lurch, which has given us to leave in the lurch,' is supposed to have been of similar character.

From card-playing comes 'aboveboard,' where 'board' has the archaic sense of 'table,' as still in 'board and lodging.' Dr. Johnson tells us that 'above-board is a figurative expression from gamesters, who, when they put their hands under the table, are changing their cards.' Its natural opposite is 'underhand.' More modern is 'to show one's hand,' in the sense of allowing one's opponent to see one's cards, while the figurative use of 'long suit,' for special ability or advantage, is a coinage of the last few years. "To lead up to' and 'to force one's hand' are both from the whist-tabie, while 'to palm off' and 'to foist on,' the latter perhaps from the Dutch word for fist, are card-sharping or dicing terms. The figurative use of 'shuffle' is of similar origin. "To play fast and loose' is from an obsolete cheating game with a string or strap.

If we were dealing with American metaphor, this would be the place for a short excursus on the origin and his

tory of 'bluff,' a word from the game of poker, which so far supplies a longfelt want that it has been adopted by many European languages. Readers of Mr. Kipling will remember how the crew of the SS. Bolivar 'euchred God Almighty's storm, bluffed the eternal sea'. The Elizabethan word was 'vie,' which has long lost all association with cards. In speaking of a man on whom complete reliance can be placed, we sometimes call him a 'trump.' The figurative use of this word is as old as Bishop Latimer, who, in his famous sermon on the Card' (1529), says, Now turn up your trump, your heart -hearts is trump, as I said before.' The use in French of 'ace' for a brilliant airman is a parallel, 'ace' having here, of course, the card sense. Approximating to a 'trump' is a 'sure card,' whence perhaps is evolved the later 'queer card,' as applied to a person, and finally, with ellipsis of the adjective, Mr. Arnold Bennett's 'Card.'

When we turn to the history of outdoor sports, we find a sharp division between those practised by the Norman noble and by the English burgher. or peasant. This division is reflected linguistically in the fact that the vocabulary of the tournament, of fal conry, and of tennis is chiefly of French origin, while that of the cheaper popular sports, such as archery, wrestling, and cudgel-playing, is mostly English. From the tournament we have 'to run full tilt,' as Don Quixote did when he 'tilted at windmills,' and we still speak figuratively of 'entering the lists.' But the contribution made by aristocratic sport is usually insignificant compared with that which is due to the people. The tournament declined with the decay of chivalry, and the young noble of the fifteenth

century began to forsake the tiltyard for the tennis-court. This aristocratic game, of which lawn-tennis is but a degenerate scion, seems to have been even more popular in France than in England, if we may judge by its contribution to popular metaphor. 'Frendre la balle au bond' (that is, to take the ball at the bound) is colloquial French for 'to seize an opportunity'; and the fact that the professional keeping of tennis-courts was handed down from father to son is responsible for the curious expression 'enfant de la balle' for a son who adopts his father's calling. French volee and English 'volley' were both probably used of the flight of the tennis-ball before being applied to a discharge of projectiles, and the following passage from Nashe (1596) might almost refer the contemporary Wimbledon :

One that stands, as it were, at the line in a tennis-court, and takes every ball at the vol

ley.

To tennis, we owe the phrase 'to drive from pillar to post,' though its exact meaning has not been traced. The allusion is to the driving of the tennis-ball, and the earlier order, found in Lydgate, was 'from post to pillar.' This was inverted to facilitate the stock rhyme with 'tossed. In the old play Liberality and Prodigality (1602), a character is described as

Every minute tost,

Like to a tennis-ball, from pillar to post.

In John Marston's comedy What you Will, the phrase is used of battledore and shuttlecock, the context suggesting that the 'pillar' and 'post' were names given to the two ends of the court. The following explanation has occurred to me as possible. It is known

that modern games have developed from simple beginnings: for example, fives was originally played against any convenient wall, and the 'pepper-box' of a modern fives-court imitates one of the buttresses of Eton College Chapel. Tennis is supposed to have sprung from a rudimentary ball-game played with simple apparatus in the courtyards and mansions and castles. The entrance gate and the front door would naturally be adopted as the two ends of the court, the pillars of the one and the posts of the other serving as boundaries. Another verb commonly used in this connection was 'to bandy.' We now 'bandy' only remarks, invectives, and so forth; but Juliet uses the word in its literal sense, when she says of the lagging messenger

Had she affections and warm youthful blood,
She'd be as swift in motion as a ball;
My words would bandy her to my sweet love,
And his to me.

What the tourney was to the noble, we may say that archery was to the commoner; and as it is the commoner, and not the noble, who makes the language, it is not surprising to find that the bowman's contribution to metaphor far exceeds that of the armoured knight. It must be remembered that during the Middle Ages every able-bodied Englishman was an expert with

The crooked stick and the gray-goose wing,
Without which England were but a fling.

After attending divine service on Sunday morning, the craftsman betook himself to the town fields, the peasant to the village green, to practise archery. This was long ago. With the progress of civilization these irreligious customs gradually lapsed, and the Englishman took to waiting with

Sabbath calm for the public houses to open. The crossbowman shot a short heavy arrow called a 'bolt,' which we still use in the phrase 'bolt upright,' with which compare 'straight as a dart.' This sense of 'bolt' also survives in 'thunderbolt,' 'a bolt from the blue' (the latter, however, adopted by Carlyle from the German), and in the verb 'to bolt' (that is, to go off like an arrow from the bow), the further transition to 'bolting one's food' being easy and natural. Our ancestors spoke of 'making a bolt or a shaft' much as country folk still speak of 'making a spoon or spoiling a horn,' and the proverbial saying that a fool's bolt is soon shot' is, I suppose, still good current English. The word 'target' is modern in its current sense. The mediæval bowman spoke of the 'mark' or the 'butt,' and such phrases as 'beside the mark,' 'to overshoot the mark,' 'not up to the mark,' 'wide of the mark,' all come from archery, the last having been adopted in the elliptical form of 'wide' by cricket. We still use 'butt' in something like its mediæval sense in 'rifle-butts,' and 'to make a butt of' a person is to use him as the target of one's satiric missiles. 'To hit the nail on the head' now suggests the competent carpenter, but originally referred to the nail or pin which marked the centre of the bull'seye. Perhaps the commonest current phrase in which connection with archery is preserved is that of 'two strings to one's bow.'

Archery declined along with chivalry, villainous saltpetre being partly responsible for the eclipse of both. No doubt the crowding into towns, where open spaces were lacking, had something to do with the neglect of the bow. Many attempts were made.

to arrest this decay. Ascham wrote Toxophilus in praise of archery, and Henry VIII founded the Honorable Artillery Company (it will be remembered that 'artillery' is the word used in the Bible for Jonathan's bow and arrows); but all in vain, and this terrible weapon, against which the musketeers of the seventeenth century would have been as helpless as sheep, survived only as a toy. Legend still preserves, along with Robin Hood and his merry men, the names of Adam Bell, Clim o' the Cleugh, and William of Cloudeslie, as renowned in their day as any prize-fighter or film-star in our own; and I cannot help thinking that the expression 'to draw the long bow' must have originally referred to some venerable survivor of Agincourt fond of favorably contrasting the weapon of his youth with the newfangled firearms, so apt to 'hang fire' or to 'flash in the pan.' Probably 'point-blank,' now associated with guns, really belongs to archery, the 'blank,' or white, being the centre of the target, at which the bowman could, if near enough, 'point' without allowing for wind or trajectory.

Just as the nobleman abandoned the tilt-yard for the tennis court, so the commoner forsook archery for bowls. The game is ancient, but was always frowned on by Church and State, partly because it led to the decay of archery, but also because it was commonly associated with gambling and knavery. It has given us the expression' 'rub,' that is 'rub of the green,' for an unexpected difficulty or obstacle, and the word 'bias,' in its earlier use, is always associated with the curving course of the bowl. Shakespeare seems to have frequented the bowling-green. In Richard II, the