strive for a certain grace and finish in every
one of his faculties. And we see to what splendid results in literature
and art and civic and personal beauty it led them.

This element is still wanting in our higher education; it is the ideal
of nobility of life and perfection. We lack it in our physical
education. That is still far from perfect. If we all, parents, children,
boys and girls, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, had some of the
Greek feeling of high admiration of physical perfection of form and
grace and activity, we should not see so many boys and girls of very
imperfect gracefulness, nor should we see fashions of dress so ruinous
to all ideals of perfection and grace. We cannot make up for the want of
this national artistic ideal of beauty of figure by artificial
gymnastics, scientific posturings, and ladders and bars. They are better
than nothing, they are a protest, they certainly remedy some defects and
prevent others. But do not you be content with them. By self-respect and
self-discipline, by healthy life, early hours, open air, natural
exercise, the joyous and free use of all your powers, by dancing,
playing games, by refusal to give way to unhealthy and disfiguring
fashions, and, above all, by an aspiration after grace and perfection,
do what you can to remedy this national defect in our ideals for girls.

Did you ever read Kingsley's "Nausicaa in London"? Do you all know who
Nausicaa was? If not, let me advise you to borrow Worsley's "Odyssey"
and read Book VI., and read Kingsley's Essay too. Nausicaa was a Greek
maiden who played at ball; and I think you are doing more to approach
the old Greek ideal when you play at lawn tennis and cricket and hockey,
and I would add rounders and many another game, than when you are going
through ordered exercises, valuable as they are, or even than when you
are learning Greek or copying Greek statues.

This leads me to say that games contribute much to remedy another
deficiency in our ideal. There is a defective power of real enjoyment of
life, of healthy spirits among us moderns. There is more enjoyment now
than there was. I think my generation was better than the one that
preceded us in this respect; we had more games, more fun, more _abandon_
in enjoyment than our fathers and mothers, your grandfathers and
grandmothers, had, if we may judge from letters published and
unpublished. And they too often thought we were a frivolous generation,
not so staid and