― Mahatma Gandhi
A black and white engraving from an 1875 issue of Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine in my personal collection. This antique illustration shows a group of five Victorian children playing Blind Man's Buff.
Blind man's buff or blind man's bluff is a variant of tag in which the player who is "It" is blindfolded. The traditional name of the game is "blind man's buff," where the word buff is used in its older sense of a small push. A version of the game was played in ancient Greece where it was called "copper mosquito." The game was played in the Tudor period, as there are references to its recreation by Henry VIII's courtiers. It was also a popular parlor game in the Victorian era. The poet Robert Herrick mentions it, along with sundry related pastimes, in his 1624 poem "A New Yeares Gift Sent to Sir Simeon Steward":
That Milk-Maids make about the hearth,
Of Christmas sports, the Wassell-boule,
That tost up, after Fox-i' th' hole:
Of Blind-man-buffe, and of the care
That young men have to shooe the Mare
Source: Wikimedia
The illustration is free to download for use in mixed-media collage, journaling, and various papercrafts projects or simply print and frame as wall art. You can find the high-res 11" x 8.5" @ 300 ppi JPEG without a watermark here.
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