During the second half, the advance in the appreciation and practice of chess has been yet more astonishing as compared with the single club in St. James’ Street, and the meeting place for chess players in St. Martin’s Lane, which existed in Philidor’s time, and the thirty clubs or so which had arisen by 1851, we have now at least five hundred, and as against the earliest chess columns in the Lancet, Bell’s Life, and the Illustrated London News, we can specify near one hundred.  It is among the middle and humbler classes that the spread of a taste for chess has been most apparent, with the fashionable or higher classes, so far as any manifestation of public interest or support is to be taken as a criterion, its appreciation has died out, and for twenty noble names among its patrons in Philidor’s time, we cannot reckon one in ours.  Another singular feature is the grave diminution in the recognized number of able exponents, commonly called Masters, which in the British list are reduced to less than a third of the well-known names of 1862.  The support of chess, trifling as it is, comes from about a score of Her Majesty’s subjects, and the total in a year does not now equal a sum very usual in a glove fight, or a Championship Billiard match, and the sums provided in a generation by our present machinery would not equal the value of one Al Mamun’s musk balls or the rewards to Ruy Lopez for a single match.

The time allowed for consideration of the moves in chess, and the management of the clocks used to regulate such is a most important element in estimating the relative strength of chess players.  So important, in fact, that pure chess, and chess with clocks is found by experience to be a very different thing with certain players.  Bird finds the clocks more trouble than the chess, and as everybody knows is heavily handicapped by them, hence his force and success in ordinary play is far greater than in tournaments.  Take the time limit alone for two players of equal reputation, who may not be disturbed or distracted by the clocks, a difference in the time limit of ten or even five moves an hour would in some cases turn the scale between them.  Passing over the faster Bird; and other English players who prefer the slower rate take a very notable example, Steinitz and Zukertort.  After the Criterion Great Tournament of 1883 opinions differed much as to which of these was the stronger player, but after the match at 15 moves an hour, in the United States, won by Steinitz with a score of 10 to 4, the palm has been generally awarded to Steinitz, and without any qualification whatever the term of champion of the chess world has been universally accorded to him and still continues to be so, notwithstanding the superior claims of Dr. Tarrasch based upon victory in three successive International Chess Tournaments, Breslan 1889, Manchester 1890, and Dresden in 1892, in the two first named not losing a single game, and in the last, one only, feats never accomplished by Steinitz.