_Cleopatra playing at Billiards._--Perhaps one of your readers, more
learned in Shakspeare than myself, can tell me what game he refers to in
the following extract:
"_Cleo._ Let us to billiards. Come, Charmian.
_Char._ My arm is sore: best play with Mardian."
_Ant. and Cleo._, Act II. Sc. 5.
Can the game of billiards, as we now have it, boast of such high antiquity
as to have been played by "the serpent of Old Nile;" or is the mention of
it simply one of the great poet's anachronisms?