Excerpt from British Sport: Past and Present

This book has been compiled in pursuance of a suggestion that extracts from the works of old writers on sport, with passages from those of modern authorities, would be of interest to sportsmen who take interest in the history of the subject.

No attempt has been made to trace the development of sports till they reached the form in which we know them, and indeed an attempt to render justice to any one of those which receive notice in the following pages would obviously demand a volume to itself.

The old sporting classics have been freely laid under contribution. The pre-eminence of Somerville, Beckford, C. J. Apperley ('Nimrod'), William Scrope, and H. H. Dixon('The Druid') singles them out for quotation: and if the essays on sport left us by such men as Professor Wilson('Christopher North') and Charles Kingsley are less familiar to the present generation of sportsmen than their merits deserve, it is merely because these have been overshadowed by the wider celebrity of the authors' work in other fields of literature.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.