“Though the precise birth and parentage of chess are absolutely unknown, yet a light marks the track of this royal personage adown the ages, by which we may clearly enough discern one significant note of his progress, that he has always kept the very best of company.  We find him ever in the bosom of civilization, the companion of the wise and thoughtful, the beloved of the studious and mild.  Barbarous men had to be humanized and elevated before he would come to them.  While the East remained the better part of the world he confined himself to the East; when the West was to be regenerated he attended with the other agents of beneficial destiny, and helped the good work on.  He seems to have entered Europe on two opposite sides.  Along with philosophy and letters Spain and Portugal received him, with other good gifts, from their benefactors the Saracens; and he is seen in the eighth century at Constantinople, quietly biding his time for a further advance. >From that time to the present, chess has been the delight of kings and kaisers, of the reflecting, the witty, and the good.”

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The Indian and American views will be found in the sequel.

It is a peculiar and distinguishing characteristic in the very long life of chess, that at no period of its existence has any attempt ever been made to place on record a narrative of its events, either contemporary or retrospective, or to preserve its materials and to construct a lasting history for it; and, notwithstanding, the enormous advance and increase in chess appreciation and chess reporting in 19th century ages, it will not, perhaps, be very rash to predict that a future generation will be scarcely better informed of our chess doings than we are of the past, and that the 20th century will, in this respect, be to the 19th as that is to the 18th and preceding ones.  The valuable scientific and weighty works of Dr. Hyde, Sir William Jones, and Professor Duncan Forbes were mostly devoted to chess in the East, and to arguments on the probabilities of its origin and proofs that it came from India.  The book of Forbes, the most elaborate and latest of them, is much devoted to the Sanskrit translations of the accounts of the ancient Hindu Chaturanga; and descriptions of other games which, however able and interesting from a scientific point of view, observation and experience seem to indicate to us, few care to follow or study much in the present day.

The period of 750 to 1500 is dismissed by Forbes in less than a single page.  His work contains no account of Philidor or his works, nor of the progress of chess in this century up to 1860 when his own book appears, and makes no mention of modern chess events or players and it is an expensive work when viewed by popular notions on the subject.  These foregoing works with the admirable contributions and treatises of the Rev. R. Lambe, the Hon. Daines Barrington, F. Douce, H. Twiss, P. Pratt, Sir F. Madden, W. Lewis, Sarratt, George Walker, C. Kenny, C. Tomlinson, Captain Kennedy, Staunton and Professor Bland all combined fail to supply our wants, besides which there is no summing up of them or their parts, or attempt to blend them into one harmonious whole, and each writer has appeared too well satisfied with his own conclusions to care to trouble himself much about those of anybody else.