The Eighth may be called a social advantage of chess, bringing men nearer to Kings and nobles, and as a cause of intimacy and friendship, and also as a preventive to disputes and idleness and vain pursuits.

The Tenth and last advantage is in combining war with sport, the utile with the dulce, in like manner as other philosophers have put moral in the mouths of beasts, and birds, and reptiles, and encouraged the love of virtue and inculcated its doctrines by allegorical writings such as the Marzaban, Namah, and Kalila wa Dimnah, under the attractive illusion of fable.

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VIDA

There is scarcely any writer who has gone through so many editions and translations as Marcus Hieronymus Vida, Bishop of Alba.  The Scacchia Ludus was published at Rome in 1527, and since then no fewer than twenty-four editions have been published in the original Latin, the last at London in 1813.  Of translation there have been eleven in Italian, four in French, and eight in English, including the one ascribed to Goldsmith, which appears in an edition of that poet’s works published by Murray in 1856.  The only German translation hitherto noticed in this country is that printed at the end of Kochs Codex (1814) but we learn from an editorial note that the version now given in the Schachtzeitung is by Herr Pastor Jesse, and that it was published at Hanover in 1830.  It was from Vida that Sir William Jones obtained the idea of his poem Caissa, which Mr. Peter Pratt described in his Studies of chess as an “elegant embellishment” an “admired effusion” and a classical offering to chess.  In the Introduction is found: 

To the reader, greeting.  Strange perchance may it seem to some (courteous Reader) that anie man should employ his time and bestow his labour in setting out such bookes, whereby men may learn to play, when indeede most men are given rather to play, than to studie and travell, which were true, if it were for the teaching of games unlawfull, as dice play, or cogging, or falsehoods in card play, or such like, but forasmuch as this game or kingly pastime is not only devoid of craft, fraud, and guile, swearing, staring, impatience, fretting and falling out, but also breedeth in the players a certaine studie, wit, pollicie, forecaste, and memorie not only in the play thereof, but also in action of publick government, both in peace and warre, wherein both Counsellors at home and Captaines abroade may picke out of these wodden pieces some prettie pollicie both how to govern their subjects in peace, how to leade or conduct lively men in the field in warre:  for this game hath the similitude of a ranged battell, as by placing the men and setting them forth on the march may very easily appeare.  The King standeth in the field in middle of his army, and hath his Queene next unto him and his Nobilitie about him, with his soldiers to defend him in the forefront of the battell.