vehicles for universal and heavy betting. It may seem heterodox to approve of wagers and stakes, when nowadays it is the pride of those interested in cricket that it rises above such things, but it must not be forgotten that customs change with the times; that betting was universal in the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth among all men who wished to be considered "smart"; and also that, but for the support and encouragement given to the game by "sportsmen" and "Corinthians," it would never have flourished in the fashion in which it flourishes to-day: indeed, there was nothing more absurd in Kent playing Hampshire for 500 guineas, than that the representatives of the two counties should fight a main of cocks for the same sum. We naturally find certain abuses which are due to the betting system, but on the whole, it kept the game alive, and soon quickened it into a more vigorous existence. Money had to be found somehow; gate-money was out of the question in the days when most matches, even the very greatest, were played on village greens or open commons; hence the natural sequence that in the men who found the stakes and laid the wagers cricket found its best and keenest patrons. To the love of betting we may probably attribute the formation of various matches in which curious combinations of numbers were made, or when certain men were played as "given" men, so that the strength of the contending parties might be equalised. Who, however, would care to go nowadays to see twenty-two of Surrey play twenty-two of Middlesex, a game
