lève without being played, the player loses a stroke."

The number and difficulty of the rules will be highly esteemed by those metaphysical golfers who bombard the Committee of the Royal and Ancient Club with questions passing the wit of man to solve! The Committee would be grateful if those inquirers would expend their subtlety in translating the rules of the jeu de mail.

My author says nothing about lady players, and does not even contemplate their existence. He gives suggestions for the making of short Malls in the grounds of country houses, but this appears to be an invention of his own. Ladies did play. Queen Mary was accused of amusing herself at jeu de mail a few days after the decease of her husband, Darnley, who was so unfortunate as to die early, when his house was blown up, in circumstances never satisfactorily explained. Probably she used a private Mall at the house of Lord Setoun. The little Dutch girl in Flinck's portrait has so many jewels that her father may have been a rich man, able to afford a small private Mall of his own.

In our own Mall the Duke of York (James II.) played constantly, and conversed with Mr Pepys on National Defence. James was a very long driver; he could drive the Mall in one stroke, and an iron shot-a short stroke at least, and he was also a famous golfer and a keen curler. After Dutch

William came I do not know that the game of Pall Mall continued to be played in England; and except in the Montpelier form of la chicane, across country or along a road, it is quite extinet on the Continent. Nevertheless it was, as Lauthier says, a noble game," and croquet seems to be its very dull and decadent descendant. SaintSimon says that the jeu de mail was going out when he wrote, about 1730-1740, and tennis also was ceasing to be the great game of France. People took to an indoors life of flirting, playing cards, and talking philosophy, and the great age of games in France was the fifteenth century, though I do not know any mention of jeu de mail till a century later.

(Here I must confess that I am not perfectly certain about the lève of the little girl in Flinck's portrait. Some may see in it a miniature form of the curious spud which the shepherds of Bethlehem carry in miniatures in fifteenth-century MSS., as does Philip Lord Wharton in Vandyck's famous portrait. Madame de Pompadour, in a portrait of her as a shepherdess, has such a spud. But that shown in Flinck's portrait would have been useless for the practical purposes of a spud-it is much too slim and light. In Lauthier's sketch of а man playing at passe the slim club has certainly a deep narrow spoon-head, but it is not distinctly made of iron.)