his game long enough to receive the intelligence. King John was at chess
when the deputies from Rouen came to inform him that Philip Augustus had
besieged their city; but he would not hear them until he had finished the
game. An old English MS. gives in the following sentence no very handsome
picture of the chess-play of King John of England:--"John, son of King
Henry, and Fulco felle at variance at Chestes, and John brake Fulco's head
with the Chest-borde; and then Fulco gave him such a blow that he almost
killed him." The laws of chess do not now permit the king such free range
of the board. Dr. Robertson, in his History of Charles V., relates that
John Frederic, Elector of Saxony, whilst he was playing with Ernest, Duke
of Brunswick, was told that the Emperor had sentenced him to be beheaded
before the gate of Wittenberg; he with great composure proceeded with the
game, and, having beaten, expressed the usual satisfaction of a victor. He
was not executed, however, but set at liberty, after five years'
confinement, on petition of Mauritius. Sir Walter Raleigh said, "I wish to
live no longer than I can play at chess." Rousseau speaks of himself as
_forcene des echecs_, "mad after chess." Voltaire called it "the one, of
all games, which does most honor to the human mind."

"When an Eastern guest was asked if he knew anything in the universe more
beautiful than the gardens of his host, which lay, an ocean of green,
broad, brilliant, enchanting, upon the flowery margin of the Euphrates, he
replied,--'Yes, the chess-playing of El-Zuli.'" Surely, the compliment,
though Oriental, is not without its strict truth. When Nature rises up to
her culmination, the human brain, and there reveals her potencies of
insight, foresight, analysis, memory, we are touched with a mystic beauty;
the profile on the mountain-top is sublimer than the mountain. But we must
heed well Mr. Morphy's advice, and not suffer this fascinating game to be
more than a porter at the gate of the fairer garden. Only when it secures,
not when it usurps the day, can it be regarded as a friend. There is a