rector there, a chess-player to his own thinking indomitable, for none of the neighbours could checkmate him:  so he thought to make quick work of a silent but thoughtful boy-stammerer,—­by tempting him at an early period of the game to take, seemingly for nothing but advantage, a certain knight (his usual dodge, it appeared) which would have ensured an ultimate defeat.  However, I declined the generous offer, which began to nettle my opponent; but when afterwards I refused to answer divers moves by the card (as he protested I ought), and finally reduced him to a positive checkmate, he flew into such an unclerical rage that I would not play again; his “revenge” might be too terrible.  For another trivial chess anecdote:  a very worthy old friend of mine, a rector too, was fond of his game, and of winning it:  and I remember one evening that his ancient servitor, bringing in the chessboard, whispered to me, “Please don’t beat him again, sir,—­he didn’t sleep a wink last night;” accordingly, after a respectably protracted struggle, some strange oversights were made, and my reverend host came off conqueror:  so he was enabled to sleep happily.  I remember too playing with pegged pieces in a box-board at so strange a place as outside the Oxford coach; and I think my amiable adversary then was one Wynell Mayow, who has since grown into a great Church dignitary.  If he lives, my compliments to him.

One of the best private chess-players I used often to encounter,—­but almost never to beat, is my old life-friend, Evelyn of Wotton, now the first M.P. for his own ancestral Deptford.  It was to me a triumph only to puzzle his shrewdness, “to make him think,” as I used to say,—­and if ever through his carelessness I managed a stale, or a draw,—­very seldom a mate,—­that was glory indeed.  If he sees this, his memory will countersign it.

Let so much suffice, as perhaps a not inappropriate word about the Literary Life’s frequent mental recreation, especially, where the player is, like Moses, “not a man of words.”

One day, by the by, this text in the original, “lo ish devarim anochi” (Exod. iv. 10), came to my lot in Pusey’s Hebrew class, to my special confusion:  but every tutor was very considerate and favoured the one who couldn’t speak, and Mr. Biscoe in particular used to say when my turn came to read or to answer,—­“Never mind, Mr. Tupper, I’m sure you know it,—­please to go on, Mr. So-and-So.”  This habitual confidence in my proficiency had the effect of forcing my consciousness to deserve it; and it usually happened that I really did know, silently, like Macaulay’s cunning augur, “who knew but might not tell.”