Billiards was practically without beginning. As with untold other excellences, so with that. Until merit is established, curiosity as to origin rarely begins. When merit is acknowledged, it is too late to trace origin.

“Let us to billiards, Charmion,” is one of Shakespeare’s many anachronisms. As introduced into “Antony and Cleopatra,” its significance is simply that the amusement was growing in favor at the English court in the time of Elizabeth, Shakespeare, and Mary, Queen of Scots, the last of whom had brought her table over with her from France.

The diligent student may read that Socrates played billiards, that Anacharsis saw it played during his travels in Greece, that St. Augustine saw a billiard-table in journeying to or in Africa, and that Cathire More, an Irish king of the second century A.D., bequeathed to his nephew “fifty billiard-balls of brass, with the pools and cues of the same material.” But the student must not go so far back as the originals in his search, lest he discover that all are translators’ errors. St. Augustine’s vision has proved to be nothing else.

Billiards is also of quasi-historical record as having been invented by Henri de Vigne, a Frenchman, for the amusement of Louis XI. As runs a story more explicit, though probably no trustier, De Vigne was only a carpenter, or cabinet-maker, who, at the order of Louis, fashioned “a billiard-table with a bed of stone, covered with cloth, and having a hole in the centre, into which the balls were driven.”

A more plausible recital is that the game was introduced to both France and England centuries before, when the Knights-Templars returned from their first or second crusade in the Holy Land. But why not have been introduced into Spain and Italy at the same period? Rome should have been a likely spot for this game of the monasteries of the East to reach, and yet Rome’s ample archives seem to have shed no light upon it, although we find the “Lives of the Roman Pontiffs” mentioning one Pope who was fond of billiards, it being the Italian game of a century or so ago. Any game of Eastern origin should have reached Spain, through the Moors, centuries before France or England got it via Palestine.

History is no happier in taking liberties with our own country by variously assigning the honor of introducing billiards here to the Spaniards in Florida under De Soto, to the English Cavaliers in Virginia, to the Huguenots settling in South Carolina in 1690, and to the primitive Hollanders of Manhattan Island. But why not to the earlier Spaniards in Florida under Ponce de Leon, to the English Cavaliers who settled one-half of the province of New Jersey, and to the Huguenots who founded New Rochelle, N. Y., at the same time that kindred refugees found lodgment in South Carolina? Other nationalities have both played the game and kept rooms in once pre-eminently cosmopolitan Holland, but the Dutch themselves have never-been a billiard-playing people; and the official proceedings before the schouts, scheppens and burgomasters of New Amsterdam may safely be challenged to show any allusion whatever to billiards.

Remote literature, whether official or otherwise, is lacking in evidence of the game anywhere in America until introduced into New York City by English officers in garrison in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, there is proof that, even as late as 1808/9, the only billiards on Manhattan Island was the English winning-and-losing game on six-pocket tables, presumptively from England. One was a 7×14 with eight legs, and having cushions stuffed with hair.

It is probably not worth disputing that, howsoever christened at first, billiards was originally an outdoor game, and that, lifted three or four feet from the ground, it was eventually taken indoors when it rained. Remotely, it may have been marbles or the immemorially ancient goff (now golf), or goff may have been remotely billiards or any one of half a dozen other outdoor jollities. Suffice that billiards to-day bears no more resemblance to what was so called a century and a half ago, before France introduced first the third ball and in 1792 the fourth, than bagatelle bears to shuffleboard or pingpong.

Obscure as that of the game itself is the origin of the “twist” and the “draw,” the two most important strokes in modern billiards. England claims them both for John Carr, the “Bath Marker,” on the ground that, at some time prior to 1823, he was the first to chalk a cue, which is not a fact; and France claims them for one Capt. Mingaud, an alleged professional billiardist, who, while imprisoned for a political offence in 1823, invented the cue-leather. As the writer recalls this Mingaudism in its entirety, as published in a book issued in Paris about 1868 and reprinted in the Billiard Cue here, it was manifestly pure romance. France may never have had a professional so named, but France did have a Capt. Roget de Lisle, who, imprisoned for a political offence about the beginning of the last century, invented the deathless “Marseillaise.” Moreover, it was about 1868 that the writer, on the authority of Prof. Wm. Lake, who was a professional billiard-player here before and after 1823, published that Camille Avout, a shoemaker, was the pioneer in turning out cue-leathers in New York City prior to 1823, in which year a few were imported from France.

Further to complicate matters, Carr is called the “father of the side-stroke” by the renowned Pierce Egan, a contemporary of Carr, in his “Annals of Sporting,” a London periodical; while later English billiard writers recount that Roomkeeper Bartley, Carr’s employer, was the inventor of the side-stroke and the draw, that in due course he showed them to his marker, and that Carr merely profited by vending, as the magical cause of both, some powdered chalk in pillboxes at two-and-sixpence a box, Italian, French and Spanish players being his easy customers.

No matter when or in what shape billiards had its beginning, it has been a favorite recreation of the good and the great for ages, and never more noticeably so than in the present one. Philosophers seek it, divines commend it, and physicians prescribe it.

Whatever its old form, its new is essentially American. Other lands have gradually yielded to the force of American ideas. Public matches were a dozen years old in this country before there was one in any other, and the American billiard tournament, never seen in England until 1874/5, and not in France until 1879, is now the accepted mode in both.

Balklining, another American idea, was unknown to the professionals and amateurs of France until 1880. It is now their standard caroming restriction, while for seven or eight years past the English have been urging a line around the table as a hindrance to the “nursery cannons” that are the most recent powerful development in their national game.

Cushion-caroms were first publicly exhibited in this country in 1867, but never in France until 1881. Three-cushion caroms, of which the Paris professionals have made a specialty during the past dozen years, constitute another game of American development, dating from 1878 in a non-public way among professionals, and going many years further back among our non-professionals.

Until the way was shown by Andrew Buist, an American, caroms were barely an incidental feature of the English game. Attention was called anew to them by the separate visits the Dions made to London more than twenty years ago. Even the prolific spot-ball play, which has likewise been surprisingly progressive, owes at least a little to this side of the Atlantic, for in advance of Buist another American—Linley Higham, the “Albany Pony”—settled in England. Spot-balling, at which he was mighty for that era on an American 6×12 table, called then for but four different strokes in England. Now it engages more than twice as many.

Modifications have likewise affected the representative players of France and America. For fifteen years after they first came together, the French were weak as compound cushioners, but strong as ball-to-ball drivers. It was the other way with the Americans, who had been brought up on 6×12 and 5½×11 pocket tables, while the French professors had been accustoming themselves to what was nearly a 4½×9 carom, whereon other cushioning than a single one, in which they were strong and the Americans weak, was an infrequent necessity. Now that the two nationalities are using the one table, there is little to choose between them in respect of cushioning and ball-to-balling. If proof were needed, there is the international championship match of January 29, 1904, with its score of 500 to 496, which is both trusty history and the latest up to date.