Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ...The idea was not dead at the beginning of the century, as Mr. Christie, the auctioneer, of St. James's Street, published a handsome and learned quarto under the n0m de plume of 'Palamedes, ' in which he argued the direct descent of the game from the ancient Greek game of pettcia. In the oldfashioned frontispiece a tall man without any clothes on, but clean shaven and with hair well arranged, is reclining on a bank with a long crook sloped over his shoulder, watching sheep with a dog at his feet. A small palisaded sheep-pen is upon a rectangular artificial slope, with lines drawn leading from the middle of the sides, and the corners converging towards the interior of the pen. This pctteia was played with five or ten pebbles of a side moving on lines, and somehow or another one side had to block the other in. There was either a dividing line in the middle, or a position considered ' sacred'--about which there are several classical references--as a point only to be moved from in extremities. The descriptions of the game, as made up from fragmentary allusions in Greek and Latin writers, are not the same by Dr. Hyde, Daines Barrington, and Palamedes, and I cannot gather what the use of the sacred line or space in the middle was. This was the game which somebody supposed to be hopScotch (or Scot) that the suitors of Penelope played at outside her door. Imagine them at it if dressed H. COLERIDGE. in the tartan pantaloons in which Ulysses on his return is painted in a large picture in the National Gallery. 'Palamedes ' supposes that, somehow or another, chess grew out of it before the Hindus improved it; and certainly with other writers he seems to be correct in not accepting Sir W. Jones's idea that chess as we have it, at least as it was among..
