Their breath a sample of last night’s regale,
Designed by nature wise, but self-made fools;
All these, and more like these, were bred at schools.”
THE TRINITY HALL CREW, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
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LARGER IMAGE
It certainly is a picture which, thank God! could not be painted now. Nor could it be written of the well-to-do youth of the nation, as was written by South and quoted by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary in illustration of the word “athletick”—“strong of body, vigorous, robust,” that “seldom shall we see in rich families that athletick soundness and vigor of constitution which is seen in cottages where nature is cook and necessity caterer.” The youth of “rich families” have now, happily become the very pink of the “strong of body, vigorous, robust,” and a practical refutation of such an opinion, in every English-speaking land.
WINNING THE HIGH JUMP.
It was fitting, though singular, that the revival of outdoor sports, which received its first check from the narrow fanaticism and repressive bitterness of the puritanical period, that saw Beelzebub in the quarter-staff and Satan in a foot-race, should have received its first impulse into new life largely from the disciples of “Muscular Christianity,” of whom Canon Kingsley may perhaps be taken as the type. Yet so it was; they fanned into life the embers in which still burnt the hidden fire, and rekindled the dormant passion for rural sports into more than its old vigor with a new purity and with a force which, ere half a century had passed, was to restore athletism to its legitimate sphere throughout the Anglo-Saxon world.