And at this moment Thucydides, a man in whom the old virtue and the new reason were in just balance, has put into the mouth of Pericles, another man of the same kind, an encomium on the modern spirit, as we may call it, of which Athens was the representative. By the mouth of Pericles, Thucydides condemned old-fashioned narrowness and illiberality. He applauded enjoyment of life. He applauded freedom from restraint. He applauded clear and fearless thinking; the resolute bringing of our actions to the rule of reason. His expressions on this point greatly remind me of the fine saying of one of your own worthies, "the ever memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eton College." "I comprise it all," says Hales, "in two words: what and wherefore. That part of your burden which contains what, you willingly take up. But that other, which comprehends why, that is either too hot or too heavy; you dare not meddle with it. But I must add that also to your burden, or else I must leave you for idle persons; for without the knowledge of why, of the grounds or reasons of things, there is no possibility of not being deceived." It seems to me probable that Hales had here in his mind the words of the Funeral Oration: "We do not esteem discussion a hurt to action; what we consider mischievous is rather the setting oneself to work with out first getting the guidance of reason.' Finally, Thucydides applauded the quality of nature which above all others made the Athenians the men for the new era,

and he used the word eutrapelos in its proper and natural sense, to denote the quality of happy and gracious flexibility. Somewhat narrowed, so as to mean especially flexibility and adroitness in light social intercourse, but still employed in its natural and favorable sense, the word descends, as we saw, to Plato and Aristotle. Isocrates speaks of the quality as one which the old school regarded with alarm and disapproval; but nevertheless, for him too the word has evidently, in itself, just the same natural and favorable sense which it has for Aristotle and Plato.

I quoted, just now, some words from the Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the wisest and one of the worst understood books in the Bible. Let us hear how

the writer goes on after the words which I quoted. He proceeds thus: "Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun; yea, if a man live many years, let him rejoice in them all; and let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. All that is to come is vanity. Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. The old rigid order breaks down, a new power appears on the scene; it is the Athenian genius, with its freedom from restraint, its flexibility, its bold reason, its keen enjoyment of life. Well, let it try what it can do. Up to a certain point it is clearly in the right; possibly it may be in the right altogether. Let it have free play, and show what it can do. "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhoid not thine hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. Whether the old line is good, or the new line, or whether they are both of them good, and must both of them be used, cannot be known without trying. Let the Athenians try, therefore, and let their genius have full swing. Rejoice; walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judg ment.' In other words: Your enjoyment of life, your freedom from restraint, your clear and bold reason, your flexibility, are natural and excellent · but on condition that you know how to live with them, that you make a real success of them.

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And a man like Pericles or Phidias seemed to afford promise that Athens would know how to make a real success of her qualities, and that an alliance between the old morality and the new freedom might be, through the admirable Athenian genius, happily established. And with such promise before his eyes. a serious man like Thucydides might well give to the new freedom the high and warm praise which we see given to it in the Funeral Oration.

But it soon became evident that the

balance between the old morality and the new freedom was not to be maintained, and that the Athenians had the defects, as the saying is, of their qualities. Their minds were full of other things than those ideas of moral order and of right on which primitive Hellas had formed itself, and of which they themselves had, in the shadow of the Parnassian sanctuary, once deeply felt the power. These ideas lost their predominance. The predominance for Athens-and, indeed, for Hellas at large ---of a national religion of righteousness, of grave ideas of conduct and moral order, outweighing all other ideas, disappeared with the decline of Delphi, never to return. Not only did these ideas lose exclusive predominance, they lost all due weight. Still, indeed, they inspired poetry; and after inspiring the great Attic poets, Eschylus and Sophocles, they inspired the great Attic philosophers, Socrates and Plato. But the Attic nation, the Hellenic people, could not manage to keep its mind bent sufficiently upon them. The Attic nation had its mind set on other things. It threw itself ardently upon other lines, which man, indeed, has to follow, which had not been enough followed, of which it strongly felt the attraction, and on which it had rare gifts for excelling. It gave its heart to those powers which we have designated, for the sake of brevity and convenience, as those of expansion, intellect, beauty, social life and manners. It allowed itself to be diverted and distracted from attention to conduct, and to the ideas which inspire conduct.

It was not that the old religious beliefs of Greece, to which the ideas that inspire conduct had attached themselves, did not require to be transformed by the new spirit. They did. The greatest and best Hellenic souls, Anaxagoras, Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, felt, and rightly felt, that they did.

The judicious historian of Greece, whom I have already quoted, Professor Curtius, says expressly "The popular faith was everywhere shaken, and a life resting simply on the traditionary notions was no longer possible. A dangerous rupture was at hand, unless the ancient faith were purged and elevated in such a manner as to

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meet the wants of the age. Mediators in this sense appeared in the persons of the great poets of Athens." Yes, they appeared; but the current was setting too strongly another way. Poetry itself, after the death of Sophocles, was seized," says Professor Curtius, "by the same current which dissolved the foundations of the people's life, and which swept away the soil wherein the emotions of the classical period had been rooted. The old perished; but the modern age, with all its readiness in thought and speech, was incapable of creating a new art as a support to its children.”

Socrates was so penetrated with the new intellectual spirit that was called a sophist. But the great effort of Socrates was to recover that firm foundation for human life which a misuse of the new intellectual spirit was rendering impossible. He effected much more for after times, and for the world,, than for his own people. His amount of success with Alcibiades may probably be taken as giving us well enough the measure of his success with the Athenian people at large. "As to the susceptibility of Alcibiades, we are told, Socrates had not come too late, for he still found in him a youthful soul, susceptible of high inspirations. But to effect in him a permanent reaction, and a lasting and fixed change of mind, was beyond the power even of a Socrates. Alcibiades oscillated and fell away, and the Athenian people, too, oscillated and fell away.

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So it came to pass, that after Æschylus had sadly raised his voice to deprecate 'unblessed freedom from restraint," and after complaints had been heard, again and again, of the loss of "the ancient morality and piety," of "the old elements of Hellas, reflexion and moderation, discipline and social morality," it came to pass that finally, at the end of the Peloponnesian war,

one result," the historian tells us, "one result alone admitted of no doubt; and that was, the horribly rapid progress of the demoralisation of the Hellenic nation."

Years and centuries rolled on, and the Hellenic genius issued forth invading and vanquishing with Alexander; and then, when Rome had afterwards conquered Greece, conquered the conquer

ors, and overspread the civilised world. And still, joined to all the gifts and graces which that admirable genius brought with it, there went, as a kind of fatal accompaniment, moral inadequacy. And if one asked why this was so, it seemed as if it could only be because the power of seriousness, of tenacious grasp upon grave and moral ideas, was wanting. And this again seemed as if it could only have for its cause, that these Hellenic natures were, in respect to their impressionability, mobility, flexibility, under the spell of a graceful but dangerous fairy, who would not let it be otherwise. "Lest thou shouldst ponder the path of life," says the Wise Man, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them." Then the new and reforming spirit, which was rising in the world, turned sternly upon this gracious flexibility, changed the sense of its name, branded it with infamy, and classed it, along with "filthiness and foolish talking, among things which are not convenient.

Now, there you have the historical course of our words eutrapelos, eutrapelia, and a specimen of the range, backwards and forwards, which a single phrase in one of our Greek or Latin classics may have.

And I might go yet further, and might show you, in the medieval world, eutrapelia, or flexibility, quite banished, clear straightforward Attic thinking quite lost; restraint, stoppage, and prejudice regnant. And coming down to our own times, I might show you fearless thinking and flexibility once more, after many vicissitudes, coming into honor; and again, perhaps, not without their accompaniment of danger. And the moral from all this-apart from the moral that in our classical studies we may everywhere find clues which will lead us a long way-the moral is, not that flexibility is a bad thing, but that the Greek flexibility was really not flexible enough, because it could not enough

bend itself to the moral ideas which are so large a part of life. Here, I say, is the true moral: that man has to make progress along diverse lines, in obedience to a diversity of aspirations and powers, the sum of which is truly his nature; and that he fails and falls short until he learns to advance upon them all, and to advance upon them harmcniously.

Yes, this is the moral, and we all need it, and no people more than ours. We so easily think that life is all on one, line! Our nation, for instance, is above all things a political nation, and is apt to make far too much of politics. Many of us-though not many, I suppose, of you here-are Liberals, and think that that is quite enough for a man. Probably you will have no difficulty in believing, that to be a Liberal is not alone enough for a man, is not saving. One might even take-and with your notions it would probably be a great treat for you-one might take the last century of Athens, and show you a society dying of the triumph of the Liberal party. And then, again, as the young are generous, you might like to give the discomfited Liberals a respite, to let the other side have its turn; and you might consent to be shown, as you could be shown in the age of Trajan and of the Antonines, a society dying of the triumph of the Conservative party. They were excellent people, the Conservative Roman aristocracy of that epoch-excellent, most respectable people, like the Conservatives of our own acquaintance. servatism, like Liberalism, taken alone, is not sufficient, is not of itself saving.

Only Con

But you have had enough for one evening. And besides, the tendencies. of the present day in education being what they are, before you proceed to have more of this sort of thing, you ought certainly to hear a great many scientific lectures, and to busy yourselves considerably with the diameter of the sun and moon.-Cornhill Magazine

BEFORE examining some groups of the higher orders of games, with the view of tracing their course in the world, it will

be well to test by a few examples the principles on which we may reason as to their origin and migrations. An intel

ligent traveller among the Kalmuks, noticing that they play a kind of chess resembling ours, would not for a moment entertain the idea of such an invention having been made more than once, but would feel satisfied that we and they and all chess-players must have had the game from one original source. In this example lies the gist of the ethnological argument from artificial games, that when any such appears in two districts it must have travelled from one to the other, or to both from a common centre. Of course this argument does not apply to all games. Some are so simple and natural that, for all we can tell, they may often have sprung up of them selves, such as tossing a ball or wrestling; while children everywhere imitate in play the serious work of grown-up life, from spearing an enemy down to moulding an earthen pot. The distinctly artificial sports we are concerned with here are marked by some peculiar trick or combination not so likely to have been hit upon twice. Not only complex games like chess and tennis, but even many childish sports, seem well-defined formations, of which the spread may be traced on the map much as the botanist traces his plants from their geographical centres. It may give us confidence in this way of looking at the subject if we put the opposite view to the test of history and geography to see where it fails. Travellers, observing the likeness of children's games in Europe and Asia, have sometimes explained it on this wise that the human mind being alike everywhere, the same games are naturally found in different lands, children taking to hockey, tops, stilts, kites, and so on, each at its proper season. But if so, why is it that in outlying barbarous countries one hardly finds a game without finding also that there is a civilised nation within reach from whom it may have been learnt. And what is more, how is it that European children knew nothing till a few centuries ago of some of their now most popular sports? For instance, they had no battledoreand-shuttlecock and never flew kites till these games came across from Asia, when they took root at once and became naturalised over Europe. The origin of kite-flying seems to lie somewhere in South-east Asia, where it is a

sport even of grown-up men, who fight their kites by making them cut one another's strings, and fly birds and monsters of the most fantastic shapes and colors, especially in China, where old gentlemen may be seen taking their evening stroll, kite-string in hand, as though they were leading pet dogs. The English boy's kite appears thus an instance, not of spontaneous play-instinct, but of the migration of an artificial game from a distant centre. Nor is this all it proves in the history of civilisation. Within a century, Europeans becoming acquainted with the South Sea Islanders found them down to New Zealand adepts at flying kites, which they made of leaves or bark cloth, and called mánu, or “bird," flying them in solemn form with accompaniment of traditional chants. traditional chants. It looks as though. the toy reached Polynesia through the Malay region, thus belonging to that drift of Asiatic culture which is evident in many other points of South Sea Island life. The geography of another of our childish diversions may be noticed as matching with this. Mr. Wallace relates that being one wet day in a Dayak house in Borneo, he thought to amuse the lads by taking a piece of string to show them cat's-cradle, but to his surprise he found that they knew more about it than he did, going off into figures that quite puzzled him. Other Polynesians are skilled in this nursery art, especially the Maoris of New Zealand, who call it maui from the name of their national hero, by whom, according to their tradition, it was invented; its various patterns represent canoes, houses, people, and even episodes in Maui's life, such as his fishing up New Zealand from the bottom of the sea. In fact, they have their pictorial history in cat's-cradle, and whatever their traditions may be worth, they stand good to show that the game was of the time of their forefathers, not lately picked up from the Europeans. In the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand it is on record that the natives were found playing a kind of draughts which was not the European game, and which can hardly be accounted for but as another result of the drift of Asiatic civilisation down into the Pacific.

Once started, a game may last on al

most indefinitely. Among the children's sports of the present day are some which may be traced back toward the limits of historical antiquity, and, for all we know, may have been old then. Among the pictures of ancient Egyptian games in the tombs of Beni Hassan, one shows a player with his head down so that he cannot see what the others are doing with their clenched fists above his back. Here is obviously the game called in English hot-cockles, in French main-chaude, and better described by its mediæval name of qui fery? or who struck?"-the blindman having to guess by whom he was hit, or with which hand. It was the Greek kollabismos, or buffet-gane, and carries with it a tragical association in those passages in the Gospels which show it turned to mockery by the Roman soldiers : when they had blindfolded him they buffeted him saying, Prophesy unto us, Christ, Who is he that smote thee?" (Luke xxii. 64; Matt. xxvi. 67; Mark xiv. 65.)

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And

Another of the Egyptian pictures plainly represents the game we know by its Italian name of morra, the Latin micatio, or flashing of the fingers, which has thus lasted on in the Mediterranean districts over three thousand years, handed down through a hundred successive generations who did not improve it, for from the first it was perfect in its fitting into one little niche in human nature. It is the game of guessing addition, the players both at once throwing out fingers and in the same moment shouting their guesses at the total. Morra is the pastime of the drinkingshop in China as in Italy, and may, perhaps, be reckoned among the items of culture which the Chinese have borrowed from the Western barbarians. Though so ancient, morra has in it no touch of prehistoric rudeness, but must owe its origin to a period when arithmetic had risen quite above the savage level. The same is true of the other old arithmetical game, odd-and-even, which the poet couples with riding on a stick as the most childish of diversions, "Ludere par impar, equitare in arundine longâ." But the child playing it must be of a civilised nation, not of a low barbaric tribe, where no one would think of classing numbers into the odd

and-even series, so that Europeans have even had to furnish their languages with words for these ideas. I asked myself the question whether the ancient Aryans distinguished odd from even, and curiously enough found that an answer had been preserved by the unbroken tradition not of Greek arithmeticians, but of boys at play. A scholiast on the Ploutos of Aristophanes, where the game is mentioned, happens to remark that it was also known as ζυγὰ ἢ ἄζυγα, " yokes or not-yokes." Now this matches so closely in form and sense with the Sanskrit terms for even and odd numbers, yuj and ayuj, as to be fair evidence that both Hindus and Greeks inherited arithmetical ideas and words familiar to their Aryan ancestors.

Following up the clues that join the play-life of the ancient and modern worlds, let us now look at the ball-play, which has always held its place among sports. Beyond mere tossing and catching, the simplest kind of ball-play is where a ring of players send the ball from hand to hand. This gentle pastime has its well-marked place in history. Thus the ancient Greeks, whose secret of life was to do even trivial things with artistic perfection, delighted in the game of Nausikaa, and on their vases is painted many a scene where ball-play, dance, and song unite in one graceful sport. The ball-dance is now scarcely to be found but as an out-ofthe-way relic of old custom; yet it has left curious traces in European languages, where the ball (Low Latin balla) has given its name to the dance it went with (Italian ballare, ballo, French bal, English ball), and even to the song that accompanied the dance (Italian ballata, French ballade, English, ballad). The passion of ball-play begins not with this friendly graceful delivery of the ball into the next hand, but when two hostile players or parties are striving each to take or send it away from the other. Thus, on the one hand, there comes into existence the group of games represented by the Greek harpaston, or seizing-game, where the two sides struggled to carry off the ball. In Brittany this has been played till modern times with the hay-stuffed soule or sun-ball, as big as a football, fought for by two communes, each striving to carry it home