commencement of Press notice, and the growth of a literature for
chess, and was distinguished by the number of works devoted to
the play of the game, not half a score of books could be traced in
England before Philidor's, besides which Caxton, 1474, dedicated
to the Duke of Clarence, Rowbotham, 1561, to the Earl of
Leicester, and Saul and Barbiere, 1617 and 1640, to Lucy, Countess
of Bedford, which constitute the most noted works recorded,
conveyed but little knowledge concerning the game, and were
scarcely more than translations of foreign works from that of
Jacobus de Cesso1us, 1290, and others, and were rather moralities
and philosophical treatises than works of practical utility from a
scientific point of view.

During the second half, the advance in the appreciation and
practice of chess has been yet more astonishing as compared with
the single club in St. James' Street, and the meeting place for
chess players in St. Martin's Lane, which existed in Philidor's
time, and the thirty clubs or so which had arisen by 1851, we
have now at least five hundred, and as against the earliest chess
columns in the Lancet, Bell's Life, and the Illustrated London
News, we can specify near one hundred. It is among the middle
and humbler classes that the spread of a taste for chess has been
most apparent, with the fashionable or higher classes, so far as
any manifestation of public interest or support is to be taken as
a criterion, its appreciation has died out, and for twenty noble
names among its patrons in Philidor's time, we cannot reckon
one in ours. Another singular feature is the grave diminution
in the recognized number of able exponents, commonly called
Masters, which in the British list are reduced to less than a
third of the well-known names of 1862. The support of chess,