1879.] on the History of Games. 129 



uncle ? " — *' Tennis-balls, my liego." By tlie ninth century the game 

 of chugan had established itself in the Eastern Empire, where its 

 name ajipears in the barbarous Greek form tCvkuvl^uv. In the Byzan- 

 tine descriptions, however, we find not the original mallet, but a long 

 staff ending in a broad bend, filled in with a network of gut-strings. 

 Thus there appear in the East, as belonging to the great sport of 

 ball-play on horseback, the first shapes of two implements which 

 remodelled the whole play-life of mcdifcval and modern Europe, the 

 chugdn being the ancestor of the mallets used in pall-mall and 

 croquet, and of an endless variety of other playing clubs and bats, 

 while the bent staff with its network was the primitive racket. The 

 fine old Persian drawing of a match at chugan, which is copied by 

 Ouscley in his ' Travels in the East,' justifies his opinion that the 

 horseback game is the original. We should not talk of polo as being 

 " hockey on horseback," but rather regard hockey as dismounted polo, 

 and class with it pall-mall, golf, and many another bat-and-ball games. 

 Indeed, when one comes to think of it, one sees that no stick being 

 necessary for the old foot game of hurling, none was used, but as soon 

 as the Persian horsemen wanted to play ball on horseback, a proper 

 instrument had to be invented. This came to be used in the foot 

 game also, so that the Orientals are familiar both with the mounted 

 and dismounted kinds. The horseback game seems hardly to have 

 taken hold in Europe till our own day, when the English brought it 

 down from Munniepoor, and it has now under the name of polo be- 

 come a world-wide sport again. But the foot-game made its way 

 early into Europe, as appears from a curious passage in Joinville's 

 ' Life of St. Louis,' written at the end of the thirteenth century. 

 Having seen the game on his crusade, and read about it in the Byzan- 

 tine historians, he argues that the Greeks must have borrowed their 

 tzy canister mm from the French, for it is, he says, a game played in 

 Languedoc by driving a boxwood ball with a long mallet, and called 

 there chicane. The modern reader has to turn this neat and patriotic 

 argument upside down, the French chicane being only a corruption of 

 the Persian chugdn ; so that what Joinville actually proves is, that 

 before his time the Eastern game had travelled into France, bringing 

 with it its Eastern name. Already, in his day, from the ball-game 

 with its shifts and dodges, the term chicane had come to be applied by 

 metaphor to the shuffles of lawyers to embarrass the other side, and 

 thence to intrigue and trickery in general. English has borrowed 

 chicane in the sense of trickery, without knowing it as the name of a 

 game. Metaphors taken from sports may thus outlast their first 

 sense, as when again people say, " Don't handy words with me," with- 

 out an idea that they are using another metaphor taken from the game 

 of hockey, which was called handy from the curved stick or club it was 

 played with. 



In France, the name of crosse, meaning a crutch, or bishop's 

 crosier, was used for the mallet, and thence the game of hockey has 

 its ordinary French name, jeu de la crosse. In Spanish the game has 



