That, viewing it, we seem almost t’ obtain
Our innocent, sweet simple years again.”
But how came the natural aptitude and expertness of the Saxon in outdoor sports to be so totally obliterated, as undoubtedly it was, up to within the past forty years? That England, above all, with her old Viking blood, should have lain torpid and effeminate; that that “hard gray weather,” which, as Kingsley says, “makes hard Englishmen,” should have become barren in results, is one of the most puzzling facts of a now happily remote past. It was not ever thus; the early poets teem with allusions to training and skill in manly sports and outdoor pastimes, but the records of the eighteenth century as surely point to their almost universal eclipse. Read Cowper’s “Timepiece,” written in 1783, and more especially his “Tirocinium; or, a Review of the Schools,” written in the following year. What a picture do they present! The tavern and the play-house, cards and the race-course, license and riot, fill the terrible picture of the youth of the period, the product of the school and college. Study languished, emulation slept, and virtue fled, is his uncontested verdict.
“See womanhood despised and manhood shamed,
With infamy too nauseous to be named;
Fops at all corners, ladylike in mien,
Civeted fellows, smelt ere they are seen.
Else coarse and rude in manners, and their tongue
On fire with curses and with nonsense hung,
Now flush’d with drunkenness, now with excess pale,