VARIATION A.

First and second moves as before. 2. King to his Queen's 5th. 3. Rook to King's 4th check. 3. King to Q. B 4th.

4. Queen's Knight's pawn checks. 4. King to his Q's Kts. 3rd. 5. Q's Bishop's pawn Mates.1

1 Black Bishop cannot take the pawn, for he has no power over the square immediately next to him.

After a careful study of the two foregoing positions, the reader will be fully qualified to follow us in what we have to state in the following chapters, which will contain all that is known to us respecting the Theory and Practice of the Shatranj. There are only two points defective, which, though not of paramount importance, would still be very interesting to us,—I mean the "Laws of Medieval Chess," and a few specimens of "Actually played Games." Unfortunately, neither of these desiderata is to be met with, so far as I know, in any work on Chess, previous to the sixteenth century. The mediæval manuscript Treatises on the Game, whether Oriental or Occidental, content themselves by giving us a few precepts of a general nature, together with a selection of Openings and End Games. These are all very excellent in their way; but, at the same time, I am inclined to think that a single well annotated game, from the hands of each of the three great Oriental masters, viz., Al Sūlī, Al 'Adali, and 'Ali Shatranji, would have been of more service to us than all the Treatises that have been written before the invention of printing. In the days of those heroes of the chequered field, there does not appear to have attended them a faithful, patient, and admiring esquire, such as our late William Greenwood Walker, who, like a shadow, every where followed our illustrious Macdonnell, for the sole pleasure of recording that

champion's prowess. The Oriental heroes, then, like those who "lived before Agamemnon," though not altogether illacrimabiles, yet are doomed to remain under some shade of obscurity-" carent quia vate sacro," that is because in those days there were wanting a D'Arblay to celebrate their combats in verse, and a Greenwood Walker' to chronicle the same in humble prose.

1 To this gentleman's enthusiastic industry we are indebted for the preservation of the splendid series of games between Macdonnell and De la Bourdonnais, played at the Westminster Chess Club, in 1834. A very clever poem ou one of the games won by Macdonnell-perhaps the boldest and most brilliant ever played-was written soon after by the Reverend Mr. D'Arblay, a talented member of the club, entitled "Caissa Rediviva," in which Mr. W. G. W. is thus alluded to.

CHAPTER IX.

Theory and Practice of the Shatranj, or Mediaval Game of Chess.-Relative Value of the Pieces.-On the Giving of Odds. Of the Five Classes of Chess Players.

I AM now entering on a subject which, I think, has hitherto been very imperfectly understood in Europe, at least in modern times. From the sources of information alluded to in our last chapter, I am enabled to lay before the reader a tolerably correct view of the mode in which Chess was played on this side of the Celestial Empire from the sixth to the sixteenth century of the Christian

era.

I may further mention that, with regard to the various Oriental MSS. which I have already briefly described, it luckily so happens that what is either omitted or lost, or summarily discussed, in one MS. is treated of more fully in one or all of the others.

The ancient board on which the primæval game of Chaturanga was played had no variety of colours; in fact, a chequered board in that case would have been rather objectionable than otherwise. When the game was modified into the Shatranj, the board, so far as we know, still remained unspotted; although the division into black and white would, in the latter case, have

been a decided improvement.' Hyde (p. 60) gives a drawing of a splendid ivory chess-board presented to him by Daniel Sheldon, Esq., an East India merchant, nearly two centuries ago, on which the squares are, indeed, ornamented, but not of different colours. The oldest representation of a chequered board in the East, that I have yet seen, is in a copy of the Shāhnāma, in the British Museum (No. 18,804, folio 260), transcribed about 150 years ago. It is a picture of the scene where Buzurjmihr is unfolding the mysteries of the game in the presence of Naushirawan and the Indian Ambassador. The Persian sage has a chequered board of sixty-four squares placed before him, with the pieces arranged thereon, and a white spot to the right. However, in none of the MSS. mentioned in our last chapter is there any allusion to the squares being of different colours. In the mediæval game of Europe the board appears to have been coloured in the thirteenth century; for in the Latin poem, sup

'While this sheet is under correction, my friend, Mr. Staunton's valuable work, entitled "Chess Praxis," (London, 1860), is just come to hand, from which I subjoin the following very sensible note on the subject of colouring :—

"The colour of the squares on a Chess Board is not material to the game. The moves, powers, and relative operation of the Men would remain the same if the squares were all of one colour, and were merely described by intersecting lines. Indeed, the practice of colouring the Board is of modern introduction. But the alternation of light and dark in the colour of the squares is of great service in point of convenience. The move of the Bishop is rendered much more easy when the Piece can only glide along squares of the same colour, and the peculiar move of the Knight would be a source not only of additional trouble, but of frequent mistakes, were it not assisted and checked by the invariable change which the Piece makes in the colour of the squares whenever it is played. The same observation applies, though in a less degree, to the other Pieces, and also to the Pawns. The legality of their march and of their capture would be much more liable to violation, and the cause of many more disputes, if both the player and the adversary were not assisted by the alternating colour of the squares, in making and watching the moves."

These apt remarks apply to the medieval game even more than to that of the present day. In Timur's "Great Chess as we shall see in our eleventh chapter, one would suppose that a chequered board would be an absolute necessity.

posed to be of that period, given in Hyde (p. 181), we have

Asser quadratus vario colore notatus;

but in an older poem of the time of the Anglo-Saxons, at least a century earlier, given by the same author, (p. 179), there is nothing said about difference of colours.

The arrangement of the pieces in the Shatranj was exactly the same as our own in the present day, that is

-the Kings stood opposite to each other, and so did the Farzins or what we now call Queens. There is a general impression, though erroneous, that on each side the Queen was placed opposite to the adverse King. This however applies only to the modern Asiatic game; but it was not so in the East 300 years ago, as may be seen in the Museum MS. (No. 16,856), dedicated to the Great Mogul of the day. The pieces and Pawns being thus drawn up, the game generally began, as with us, by moving either the King's or Queen's Pawn; with this difference, however, that in the Shatranj the Pawns could move only one square at the commencement. Real good Real good players, however, in order to save time, played up some ten or twelve moves at once on either side, which they called forming their battle array, of which more hereafter. The King, Rook, and Knight, moved exactly as they do now. The Farzin, or what we call the Queen, moved one square diagonally; consequently, her power slowly extended only over that half of the squares which we should say were of her own colour.

There is one exception to this rule of "moving only one square at the beginning," and that is when the parties agreed to play up at once ten or twelve moves on either side, each player being confined to his own half of the board, in which case it was optional to play the Pawn one or two squares. We have shewn in the Chaturanga that the Pawn always moved one square only, and such was the case in the Shatranj in general, as we shall show in our next chapter when we come to treat of the Ta'biyat or "battle array."