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§ 15. Accordingly, the Germans, in seeking to base their physical education on Greek lines, seem to make the capital mistake of ignoring that kind of exercise for boys which vastly exceeds in value any training in gymnasia. The Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s is a far more beautiful sight, and far better for the performers, than the boys’ wrestling or running at Olympia. And besides the variety of exercise at a game like cricket, and the various intelligence and decision which it stimulates, a great part of the game lies not in the winning, but in the proper form of the play, in what the Greeks so highly prized as eurythmy—a graceful action not merely in dancing and ball-playing, but in the most violent physical exertion.

But the Greeks had no playgrounds beyond the palæstra or gymnasium; they had no playgrounds in our sense; and though a few proverbs speak of swimming as a universal accomplishment which boys learned, the silence of Greek literature on the subjectssss1 makes one very suspicious as to the generality of such training.