el that he was
expected to reach the highest standard of truthfulness, courage, and
duty to the little community of the House, or the cricket eleven, or
the football team.

Some have begun to think that in English schools and universities too
much time is given to athletic sports, and that they absorb too
largely the thoughts and interests of the English youth. Bowen,
however, attached the utmost value to games as a training in
character. He used to descant upon the qualities of discipline,
good-fellowship, good-humour, mutual help, and postponement of self
which they are calculated to foster. Though some of his friends
thought that his own intense and unabated fondness for these
games--for he played cricket and football up to the end of his
life--might have biassed his judgment, they could not deny that the
games ought to develop the qualities aforesaid.

"Consider the habit of being in public, the forbearance, the
subordination of the one to the many, the exercise of judgment, the
sense of personal dignity. Think again of the organising faculty that
our games develop. Where can you get command and obedience, choice
with responsibility, criticism with discipline, in any degree remotely
approaching that in which our social games supply them? Think of the
partly moral, partly physical side of it, temper, of course, dignity,
courtesy.... When the match has really begun, there is education,
there is enlargement of horizon, self sinks, the common good is the
only good, the bodily faculties exhilarate in functional development,
and the make-believe ambition is glorified into a sort of ideality.
Here is boyhood at its best, or very nearly at its best. _Sursum
crura!..._ When you have a lot of human beings, in highest social
union and perfect organic action, developing the law of their race and
falling in unconsciously with its best inherited traditions of
brotherhood and common action, you are not far from getting a glimpse
of one side of the highest good. There lives more soul in honest play,
believe me, than in half the hymn-books."

These words, taken from a half-serious essay on Games written for a
private society, give some part of Bowen's views. The whole essay is
well worth reading.[55] Its arguments do not, however, quite settle
the matter. The playing of games may have, and indeed ought to have,
the excellent results Bowen claimed for it, and yet it may be doubted
whether the experience of life shows that boys so