to institute comparisons between past and present great players is indulged in, for in the absence of a single published complete and annotated game until the 19th century, there is little advantage in conjecturing whether Al Suli was equal to Philidor, Razi or Greco to A. McDonnell of Belfast, Ali Shatranji to La Bourdonnais, Paoli Boi to Anderssen, Ruy Lopez to Staunton, or Leonardo to Morphy, though these conjectural comparisons in varied forms are not uncommon in modern chess talk.

The records of incidents, and the anecdotes appertaining to chess or chess players in the middle ages, are so scattered, scant, and meagre, that no writer has attempted to put them into shape, or make a consecutive or connected narrative of them.  Even Professor Duncan Forbes the most elaborate of all the European writers on the history of chess, dismisses the period from 750 to 1500 A.D., in a very few words not vouchsafing to it in his volume of 400 pages a chapter of a single page, though his book able as it is, contains much description of games of the past in different countries, the interest in which seems not considerable in present days.  The Hon. Daines Barrington writing in 1787, says, (and others have followed him to a like effect), “Our ancestors certainly played much at chess before the general introduction of cards, as no fewer than twenty-six English families have emblazened chess boards and chess rooks on their arms, and it therefore must have been considered as a valuable accomplishment.”

The opinions so commonly entertained and expressed, however, so far at least as they can be taken to apply to the period before Queen Elizabeth’s reign, rest upon but slender data, and it is highly probable that even in that monarch’s reign the practice of chess was confined to a very limited circle for we read of no fine player, great games, or matches, or public competitions of any kind, in our climes until Philidor’s time; his career in England though intermittant extended close upon fifty years and from his time may be dated the budding forth of the popularity of chess, which began to come to full bloom about 1828, (33 years after his death) and produced its fruits in the France and England championship contests of 1834 and 1843, and the inception of International Tournaments in 1851 which first established Germany’s great reputation and furnished a chess champion of the world from among them.

Though the contests between the rival champions of Spain and Italy, were promoted as tests of skill, at the courts of Philip and Sebastian, and rewarded with a liberality unheard of, since the days of Chosroes and Al Mamun, and took place during the contemporary reign of Queen Elizabeth, when chess had become decidedly fashionable in England, we find no record of the games, or that any interest or enthusiasm appears to have been evoked by them in any country except those where they took place.  They seem to have led to no emulation in other parts of Europe, and we read of