.

Doubtless Grecian Art owed its superiority, in some degree, to the
gymnasium. Living models of manliness, grace, and beauty were daily
before the artist's eye. The _stadium_ furnished its fleet runners,
nimble as the wing-footed Mercury,--fit types for his light and airy
conceptions; while the arena of the athletes offered marvellous
opportunities for the study of muscle and posture, to show its results
in the burly limbs of Hercules or the starting sinews of Laocooen. Many
of the most lifelike groups of marble which remain to us from that time
are but copies of the living statues who wrestled or threw the quoit in
the public gymnasium.

It is worthy of remark, in corroboration of this view, that the
department of the fine arts which depended on outline surpassed
that which derived its power from coloring and perspective. The
sculptors far excelled the painters. The statue was the natural result
of the imitative faculty surveying the nude human figure in every
posture of activity or repose. Pictures came later, from more educated
senses, and from minds which had first learned outward nature through
the medium of the simpler arts.

The ancient gymnasium, apart from its baths and philosophic groves,
was far from being, as with us, a mere appendage of the school. Modern
instructors advertise, that, in addition to teachers of every tongue and
art, "a gymnasium is attached" to their educational institutions. In old
times, the gymnasium was the school,--the public games and festivals its
"annual exhibitions."

The word _gymnasium_ has reference in its derivation to the nude or
semi-nude condition of those who exercised there. But in their proper
classical interpretation the public gymnasia were, to a great extent,
places set apart for physical education and training. Gymnastics,
indeed, in the broadest sense of the word, have been cultivated in all
ages. The spontaneous exercises and mimic contests of the boys of all
countries, the friendly emulation of robust youth in trials of speed and
strength, and the discipline and training of the military recruit have
in them much of the true gymnastic element. In Attica and Ionia they
were first adapted to their noblest ends.

The hardy Spartans, who valued most the qualities of bravery, endurance,
and self-denial, used the gymnasia only as schools of training for the
more sanguinary contests of war. So, too, the martial Roman despised
those who practised gymnastics with any