THE ORIGIN OF POLO 321 



almost exactly similar to those in use at the present day, 

 and the horses, though not precisely ponies, are Arabs 

 under 15 hands with small heads and tapering muzzles. 



The works of another great Persian poet, Hafiz, a con- 

 temporary of our own Chaucer, teem with allusions to the 

 game. " May the heads of your enemies be your chaugan 

 balls," is the grim wish with which the poet flatters his 

 imperial patron. And the favourite national pastime 

 supplied him with metaphors of a less blood-thirsty sort. 

 " Man," he writes, " is a ball tossed into the field of exist- 

 ence, driven hither and thither by the chaugan stick of 

 destiny wielded by the hand of Providence." But chaugan 

 supplied the Persian poet with an image descriptive of the 

 tenderest of human emotions : " The heart of the lover is 

 the ball, while the curling lovelock of his charmer is as 

 the curved club that impels it." 



In its early days, however, polo or chaugan was not 

 regarded as a very reputable pastime. There it resembles 

 cricket and football. In the middle of the eighteenth 

 century to be a cricketer or the associate of cricketers was 

 looked upon as the sure mark of a " rake-hell," a man of 

 loose character and abandoned habits ; whilst football and 

 golf have been denounced as demoralising pastimes in 

 more than one old Act of Parliament. But we have 

 changed all that, and society is proud of its famous 

 cricketers, golfers, poloists, and footballers. 



In the fifteenth century polo, to give it its modern name, 

 was popular all over Central Asia, and particularly in Tibet, 

 from which country it permeated to India and thence 

 to Great Britain. In a quaint old book, entitled The 

 Adventures of the Three Sherleys, written by one George 

 Mainwaring and descriptive of a voyage undertaken by Sir 

 Anthony Sherley and his brother to the court of Shah 

 Abbas, King of Persia, in 1 509, the following description of 

 the game is given : — 



"Before the house there was a very fair place, to the 

 quantity of some ten acres of ground, made very plain ; 

 so the King went down, and when he had taken his horse, 

 the drums and trumpets sounded. There were twelve 

 horsemen in all, with the King ; so they divided themselves, 



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