rawny, brown-necked men, who can string
their muscles from dawn to sundown, and go home without an ache to the
sound slumber which will make them fresh again for to-morrow's toil! I
am a man in the middle years, with limbs shaped as those of another, and
subject to no prostrating malady, yet I doubt whether I could endure the
lightest part of this field labour even for half an hour. Is that indeed
to be a man? Could I feel surprised if one of these stalwart fellows
turned upon me a look of good-natured contempt? Yet he would never dream
that I envied him; he would think it as probable, no doubt, that I should
compare myself unfavourably with one of the farm horses.

There comes the old idle dream: balance of mind and body, perfect
physical health combined with the fulness of intellectual vigour. Why
should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me, yet none
the less live for thought? Many a theorist holds the thing possible, and
looks to its coming in a better time. If so, two changes must needs come
before it; there will no longer exist a profession of literature, and all
but the whole of every library will be destroyed, leaving only the few
books which are universally recognized as national treasures. Thus, and
thus only, can mental and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.

It is idle to talk to us of "the Greeks." The people we mean when so
naming them were a few little communities, living under very peculiar
conditions, and endowed by Nature with most exceptional characteristics.
The sporadic civilization which we are too much in the habit of regarding
as if it had been no less stable than brilliant, was a succession of the
briefest splendours, gleaming here and there from the coasts of the
Aegean to those of the western Mediterranean. Our heritage of Greek
literature and art is priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for
us not the slightest value. The Greeks had nothing alien to study--not
even a foreign or a dead language. They read hardly at all, preferring
to listen. They were a slave-holding people, much given to social
amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry. Their ignorance was
vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods. Together with their fair
intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses. If we could see and speak
with an average Athenian of the Periclean age, he would cause no little
disappointment--there would be so much more of the barbarian in him, a