ADaily Missouri Republican, St. Louis, Missouri, Wednesday, June 08, 1859
“…Agassiz succeeded in being witty through the earnestness with which he protested that he was not witty, and also by comparing the diagonal movements of the bishops, in chess, to those of a crab, and the darting zig-zag movements of the knights to those of the insect called the devil's darning needle. James T. Fields then read a funny parody upon Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, illustrating Morphy's charges in Europe; and Charles Hale poke for the Press very neatly; and the Rev. Starr King—it was already after midnight—said that he had seen a picture of a man playing a game of chess with the devil for his soul, and a clergyman had preached a sermon on it. Had Paul Morphy been the man represented in that picture, probably that sermon would never have been preached, for, in fact, Paul Morphy beat the devil at chess.”
