There is no call for any one to vindicate this game. Chess is a great,
worldwide fact. Wherever a highway is found, there, we may be sure, a
reason existed for a highway. And when we find that the explorer on his
northward voyage, pausing a day in Iceland, may pass his time in keen
encounters with the natives,--that the trader in Kamtschatka and China,
unable to speak a word with the people surrounding him, yet holds a long
evening's converse over the board which is polyglot,--that the missionary
returns from his pulpit, and the Hindoo from his widow-burning, to engage
in a controversy without the _theologicum odium_ attached,--the game
becomes authentic from its universality. It is akin to music, to love, to
joy, in that it sets aside alike social caste and sectarian differences:
kings and peasants, warriors and priests, lords and ladies, mingle over the
board as they are represented upon it. "The earliest chess-men on the banks
of the Sacred River were worshippers of Buddha; a player whose name and
fame have grown into an Arabic proverb was a Moslem; a Hebrew Rabbi of
renown, in and out of the Synagogues, wrote one of the finest chess poems
extant; a Catholic priest of Spain has bestowed his name upon two openings;
one of the foremost problem--composers of the age is a Protestant clergyman
of England; and the Greek Church numbers several cultivators of chess
unrivaled in our day." It has received eulogies from Burton,--from
Castiglione,--from Chatham, who, in reply to a compliment on a grand stroke
of invention and successful oratory, said, "My success arose only from
having been checkmated by discovery, the day before, at chess,"--from
Comenius, the grammarian,--from Conde, Cowley, Denham, Justus van Effen,
Sir Thomas Elyot, Guillim, Helvetia, Huarte, Sir William Jones, Leibnitz,
Lydgate, Olaus Magnus, Pasquier, Sir Walter Raleigh, Rousseau, Voltaire,
Samuel Warren, Warton, Franklin, Buckle, and many others of ability in
every department of letters, philosophy, and art. We know of but one man of
genius or learning--who has repudiated it,--Montaigne. "Or if he