thereby, doubtless, scoring a lost ball. He describes this as 'a stool-ball chance.' Chapman does not say whether the ball was bowled to Nausicaa. Everything shows that Dr. Johnson was writing at random when he described stool-ball as a game 'in which a ball is driven from stool to stool.' Chapman conceives Nausicaa as making a 'boundary hit.' There would be no need of such hitting if balls were only 'driven from stool to stool.'
Strutt's remarks on stool-ball merely show that he did not appreciate the importance of the game as an early form of cricket. 'I have been informed,' he says, 'that a pastime called stool-ball is practised to this day in the northern parts of England, which consists simply in setting a stool upon the ground, and one of the players takes his place before it, while his antagonist, standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of striking the stool, and this it is the business of the former to prevent by beating it away with his hand, reckoning one to the game for every stroke of the ball,' apparently without running. 'If, on the contrary, it should be missed by the hand and strike the stool, the players change places.' Strutt adds, in a note, that he believes the player may be caught out. He describes another game in which stools are set as 'bases' in a kind of base-ball. He makes the usual quotations from Durfey about 'a match for kisses at stool-ball to play.'[1]
Brand's notes on stool-ball do no more than show that men and women played for small wagers, as in Herrick,
At stool-ball, Lucia, let us play
For sugar, cakes, and wine.[2]
It is plain enough that stool-ball was a game for girls, or for boys and girls, and Herrick and Lucia. As at present played stool-ball is a woman's game; but no stool is used: what
- ↑ Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, 1810, pp. 89, 90; cf. Durfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy, i. 91.
- ↑ Popular Antiquities, i. 153, note. London, 1813. The lines are quoted by Brand from A Pleasant Grove of New Fancies, p. 74. London, 1657. He might have gone straight to Herrick, Hesperides (1648), p. 280.
