Sith therefore this game is pleasant to all, profitable to most, hurtful to none.  I pray thee (gentle reader) take this my labour in good part, and thou shalt animate me hereafter to the setting forth of deeper matters.  Farewell.  Ludus scacchi.

Peter Pratt of Lincoln’s Inn, author of the “Theory of Chess,” (1799) a work referred to by Professor Allen, the biographer of Philidor as “the most divertingly absurd of all chess books.”  Some idea of the plan and style of the work may be obtained from the following extract from the author’s preface:  “The game of chess, though generally considered as an emblem of war (the blood stained specie of it) seemed to him (the author) more to resemble those less ensanguined political hostilities which take place between great men in free countries, an idea which was at once suggested and confirmed by observing that when one combatant is said to have conquered another, instead of doing anything like killing or wounding him, he only casts him from his place and gets into it himself.”  Fortified in this conceit the ingenious author converts the Pawns into Members of the House of Commons, the Rooks into Peers, while the Queen is transformed into a Minister, and the whole effect of this curious nomenclature upon the notation of the games is ludicrous in the extreme.

An American view was presented in the following words, it would probably have also have disturbed the equanimity of Forbes like that of Pope’s did (page 20).

The date to which I have referred the origin of chess will probably astonish those persons who have only regarded it as the amusement of idle hours, and have never troubled themselves to peruse those able essays in which the best of antiquaries and investigators have dissipated the cloudy obscurity which once enshrouded this subject.  Those who do not know the inherent life which it possesses will wonder at its long and enduring career.  They will be startled to learn that chess was played before Columbus discovered America, before Charlemagne revived the Western Empire, before Romulus founded Rome, before Achilles went up to the Siege of Troy, and that it is still played as widely and as zealously as ever now that those events have been for ages a part of history.  It will be difficult for them to comprehend how, amid the wreck of nations, the destruction of races, the revolutions of time, and the lapse of centuries, this mere game has survived, when so many things of far greater importance have either passed away from the memories of men, or still exist only in the dusty pages of the chroniclers.  It owes, of course, much of its tenacity of existence to the amazing inexhaustibility of its nature.  Some chess writers have loved to dwell upon the unending fertility of its powers of combinations.  They have calculated by arithmetical rules the myriads of positions of which the pieces and pawns are susceptible.  They have told us that a life time of many ages would