The fine thing about a wrangle on cricket is that there is no bitterness in it.  When you talk about politicians you are always on the brink of bad temper.  When you disagree about the relative merits of W.B.  Yeats or Francis Thompson you are afflicted with scorn for the other’s lack of perception.  But you may quarrel about cricketers and love each other all the time.  For example, I am prepared to stand up in a truly Christian spirit to the bowling of anybody in defence of my belief that—­next to him of the black beard—­Lohmann was the most naturally gifted all-round cricketer there has ever been.  What grace of action he had, what an instinct for the weak spot of his opponent, what a sense for fitting the action to the moment, above all, what a gallant spirit he played the game in!  And that, after all, is the real test of the great cricketer.  It is the man who brings the spirit of adventure into the game that I want.  Of the Quaifes and the Scottons and the Barlows I have nothing but dreary memories.  They do not mean cricket to me.  And even Shrewsbury and Hayward left me cold.  They were too faultily faultless, too icily regular for my taste.  They played cricket not as though it was a game, but as though it was a proposition in Euclid.  And I don’t like Euclid.

It was the hearty joyousness that “W.G.” shed around him that made him so dear to us youngsters of all ages.  I will admit, if you like, that Ranjitsinhji at his best was more of a magician with the bat, that Johnny Briggs made you laugh more with his wonderful antics, that A.P.  Lucas had more finish, Palairet more grace, and so on.  But it was the abundance of the old man with the black beard that was so wonderful.  You never came to the end of him.  He was like a generous roast of beef—­you could cut and come again, and go on coming.  Other men flitted across our sky like meteors, but he shone on like the sun in the heavens, and like the sun in the heavens he scattered largesse over the land.  He did not seem so much a man as an institution, a symbol of summer and all its joys, a sort of Father Christmas clothed in flannels and sunshine.  It did you good merely to look at him.  It made you feel happy to see such a huge capacity for enjoyment, such mighty subtlety, such ponderous gaiety.  It was as though Jove, or Vulcan, or some other god of antiquity had come down to play games with the mortals.  You would not have been much surprised if, when the shadows lengthened across the greensward and the umpire signalled that the day’s play was done, he had wrapped himself in a cloud of glory and floated away to Olympus.

And now he is gone indeed, and it seems as though a part, and that a very happy part, of my life has gone with him.  When sanity returns to the earth, there will arise other deities of the cricket field, but not for me.  Never again shall I recapture the careless rapture that came with the vision of the yellow cap flaming above the black beard, of the Herculean frame and the mighty bared arms, and all the godlike apparition of the master.  As I turned out of the little station and passed through the fields and climbed the hill I felt that the darkness that has come upon the earth in these days had taken a deeper shade of gloom, for even the lights of the happy past were being quenched.