PREFACE 



THIS book has been compiled in pursuance of a 

 suggestion that extracts from the works of old 

 writers on sport, with passages from those of 

 modern authorities, would be of interest to sportsmen who 

 take interest in the history of the subject. 



No attempt has been made to trace the development of 



sports till they reached the form in which we know them ; 



and indeed an attempt to render justice to any one of those 



which receive notice in the following pages would obviously 



' demand a volume to itself. 



The old sporting classics have been freely laid under con- 

 tribution. The pre-eminence of Somerville, Beckford, C. J. 

 Apperley ('Nimrod'), WilHam Scrope, and H. H. Dixon ('The 

 Druid ') singles them out for quotation : and if the essays on 

 sport left us by such men as Professor Wilson (' Christopher 

 North ') and Charles Kingsley are less familiar to the present 

 generation of sportsmen than their merits deserve, it is merely 

 because these have been overshadowed by the wider celebrity 

 of the authors' work in other fields of literature. 



For permission to make extracts from modern works my 

 thanks are due to Messrs. Vinton and Co., Ltd., who have 



