hardly suffice even to count them.  We know, too, that while the composers of the orient and the occident have displayed during long centuries an admirable subtility and ingenuity in the fabrications of problems, yet the chess stratagems of the last quarter of a century have never been excelled in intricacy and beauty.  We have witnessed, in our day contests brilliant with skilful maneuvers unknown to the sagacious and dexterous chess artists of the Eighteenth century.

Within the last thirty years we have seen the invention of an opening as correct in theory, and as elegant in practice as any upon the board, and of which our fathers were utterly ignorant.  The world is not likely to tire of an amusement which never repeats itself, of a game which presents today, features as novel, and charms as fresh as those with which it delighted, in the morning of history, the dwellers on the banks of the Ganges and Indus.

An Indian philosopher thus described it: 

It is a representative contest, a bloodless combat, an image, not only of actual military operations, but of that greater warfare which every son of the earth, from the cradle to the grave, is continually waging, the battle of life.  Its virtues are as innumerable as the sands of African Sahara.  It heals the mind in sickness, and exercises it in health.  It is rest to the overworked intellect, and relaxation to the fatigued body.  It lessens the grief of the mourner, and heightens the enjoyment of the happy.  It teaches the angry man to restrain his passions, the light-minded to become grave, the cautious to be bold, and the venturesome to be prudent.  It affords a keen delight to youth, a sober pleasure to manhood, and a perpetual solace to old age.  It induces the poor to forget their poverty, and the rich to be careless of their wealth.  It admonishes Kings to love and respect their people, and instructs subjects to obey and reverence their rulers.  It shows how the humblest citizens, by the practise of virtue and the efforts of labour, may rise to the loftiest stations, and how the haughtiest lords, by the love of vice and the commission of errors, may fall from their elevated estate.  It is an amusement and an art, a sport and a science.  The erudite and untaught, the high and the low, the powerful and the weak, acknowledge its charms and confirm its enticements.  We learn to like it in the years of our youth, but as increased familiarity has developed its beauties, and unfolded its lessons, our enthusiasm has grown stronger, and our fondness more confirmed.

Note.  The earliest example of praise and censure of chess strikes us as very curious and sufficiently interesting to be presented as illustrating two varieties of Arabian style, and as exhibiting two sides of the question.  It is from one of the early Arabian manuscripts called the Yawakit ul Mawakit in the collection Baron Hammer Purgstall at Vienna.

                    By Ibn Ul Mutazz. 
                    Censure of chess.