crease health and vigour and
needs no expensive resources. Yet what would be said and thought if a
prelate and his suffragan ran nimbly out of a palace gate in a
cathedral close, with little bells tinkling, whips cracking, and reins
of red ribbon drawn in to repress the curvetting of the gaitered steed?
There is nothing in reality more undignified about that than in hitting
a little ball about over sandy bunkers. If the Prime Minister and the
Lord Chief Justice trundled hoops round and round after breakfast in
the gravelled space behind the Horse Guards, who could allege that they
would not be the better for the exercise? Yet they would be held for
some mysterious reason to have forfeited respect. To the mind of the
philosopher all games are either silly or reasonable; and nothing so
reveals the stupid conventionality of the ordinary mind as the fact
that men consider a series of handbooks on Great Bowlers to be a
serious and important addition to literature, while they would hold
that a little manual on Blind-man's Buff was a fit subject for
derision. St. Paul said that when he became a man he put away childish
things. He could hardly afford to say that now, if he hoped to be
regarded as a man of sense and weight.

I do not wish to be a mere Jeremiah in the region of prophecy, and to
deplore, sarcastically and incisively, what I cannot amend. What I
rather wish to do is to make a plea for greater simplicity in the
matter, and to try and destroy some of the terrible priggishness in the
matter of athletics, which appears to me to prevail. After all,
athletics are only one form of leisurely amusement; and I maintain that
it is of the essence of priggishness to import solemnity into a matter
which does not need it, and which would be better without it. Because
the tyranny is a real one; the man of many games is not content with
simply enjoying them; he has a sense of complacent superiority, and a
hardly disguised contempt for the people who do not play them.

I was staying in a house the other day where a distinguished
philosopher had driven over to pay an afternoon call. The call
concluded, he wished to make a start, so I went down to the stable with
him to see about putting his pony in. The stables were deserted. I was
forced to confess that I knew nothing about the harnessing of steeds,
however humble. We discovered portions of what appeared to be the
equipment of a pony, and I held them for him, while he gingerly trie