To those who have not thought particularly about straightforward prose talk, and poetry which is set in metre and rhyme, and song which is chanted to a tune, it may seem that these are three clearly distinct things. But on careful examination it is found that they shade into one another, and it can be made out how human speech passed into all three states. Savage tribes have some set form in their chants, which shows they feel them different from common talk. Thus Australians, to work themselves into fury before a fight, will chant, “Spear his forehead!—Spear his breast!—Spear his liver!—Spear his heart!” and so on with the other parts of the enemy’s body. Another Australian chant is sung at native funerals, the young women taking the first line, the old women the second, and all together the third and fourth.

Here the words of the savage chant are no longer mere prose, but have passed into a rude kind of verse. All barbaric tribes hand down such songs by memory, and make new ones. The North American hunter has chants which will bring him on the bear’s track next morning, or give him victory over an enemy. The following is the translation of a New Zealand song:—

This last shows a feature extremely common in barbaric songs, the refrain of generally meaningless syllables. We moderns are often struck with the absurdity of the nonsense-chorus in many of our own songs, but the habit is one which seems to have been kept up from the stages of culture in which the Australian savage sings “Abang! abang!” over and over at the end of his verse, or a Red Indian hunting-party enjoy singing in chorus “Nyah eh wa! nyah eh wa!” to an accompaniment of rattles like those which children use with us.

It is among nations at a higher stage of culture that there appears regular metre, where the verses are measured accurately in syllables. The ancient hymns of the Veda are in regular metre, and this is proof how far the old Aryans had advanced beyond the savage state. Indeed the resemblances between the metre of the most ancient Indian and Persian and Greek poetry show that in the remote ages of their national connection their measured verse had already begun. Metre is best known to us from Greek and Latin verses, but there are more metres in the world than Horace knew of. For instance, when Longfellow versified a collection of American native tales in his “Song of Hiawatha,” he found no metre among the Indians themselves, who were not cultured enough to have such a device; so he imitated the peculiar metre of the Kalewala, the epic poem chanted by the native bards of Finland. Our own poetry, where the verses are scanned by accent, differs in its nature from the classic metres whose syllables are measured by quantity or length. Later than the invention of metre, came other means by which the poet could please his hearers with new effects of matched and balanced sounds. Thus our early English forefathers rejoiced in alliteration, where the same consonant comes in again and again, with a frequency which would weary our modern taste, though our ear is pleased with occasional touches of it, as

Rhyme, too, seems comparatively modern in the world’s history of poetry. Its clumsy beginnings may be judged from such lines as these of an old Latin poet (perhaps Ennius) quoted by Cicero:—

Thus the Christian hymns of the middle ages, such as the famous “Dies Iræ,” did not bring in rhyme as quite a novelty, but they used it skilfully and made it common, and it was taken up also by the Troubadours, the masters and teachers of Europe in the poetic art.

The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once pictures for the imagination and music for the ear. But besides this, it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic art lies in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. The modern poet still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense. This may be seen in analyzing a poem of Shelley’s:—

Here the likeness of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illustrate the notion of paleness, and the dawn of redness; while to convey the idea of the dawn shining over the sea the simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced, and its reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and on the other to blushing. Now this is the very way in which early barbaric man, not for poetic affectation, but simply to find the plainest words to convey his thoughts, would talk in metaphors taken from nature. Even our daily prose is full of words, now come down to ordinary use, which show vestiges of this old nature-poetry, and the etymologist may, if he will, set up again the pictures of the old poetic thoughts which made the words.

To read or recite poetry as we moderns do is to alter its proper nature, for the purpose of poetry was to be chanted. But this very chanting or singing grew out of talking. On listening carefully to the talk going on around us, we may observe that it does not run in an unchanged monotone, but that all sentences are intoned to an imperfect tune, a rise and fall of pitch marking the phrases, distinguishing question and answer, and touching emphatic words with a musical accent. This half-melody of common speech may be roughly written down in notes; it is not the same in English and German; and indeed one way in which a Scotchman’s talking is known from an Englishman’s is the different intoning of his phrases. When speech becomes solemn or impassioned, it passes more and more into natural chanting, which at devotional meetings may be heard nearly passing into distinct tune. The intoning in churches arose from the same natural utterance of religious feeling, but in course of time it became fixed by custom, and was forced into the regular intervals of the musical scale. So the artificial recitative of the opera is a modern musical working up of what has come down by tradition of the ancient tragic declamation, which once swayed the listening throng of the Greek theatre.

We are apt to take it as a matter of course that all music must be made up of notes in scale, and that scale the one we have been used to from childhood. But the chants of rude tribes, which perhaps best represent singing in its early stages, run in less fixed tones, so that it is difficult to write down their airs. The human voice is not bound to a scale of notes, for its pitch can glide up and down. Nor among nations who sing and play by musical scales are the tones of these scales always the same. The question how men were led to exact scales of tones is not easy to answer fully. But one of the simplest scales was forced upon their attention by that early musical instrument the trumpet, rude forms of which are seen in the long tubes of wood or bark blown by forest tribes in South America and Africa. A trumpet (a six feet length of iron gas-pipe will do) will sound the successive notes of the “common chord,” which may be written c e g c, on which the trumpeter performs the simple tunes known so well as trumpet-calls. This natural scale, perfect so far as it goes, contains the most important of musical intervals, the octave, fifth, fourth, and third. Another scale, of more notes than this, though of fewer than our full scale, is not less familiar to English ears. This is the old five-tone scale, without semitones, which can be played on the five black keys of the pianoforte, and the best-known form of which may be written c, d, e, g, a, c. Old Scotch airs are on the five-tone scale, which indeed may still be met with across the world, as where some traveller in China watching a funeral procession has been surprised to hear a melancholy dirge like what he last heard played by a piper on the shore of a Highland loch. Engel, in his Music of Ancient Nations, shows that music of this pentatonic or five-toned kind has belonged since early times to other Eastern nations, so that any genuine Scotch melody like “Auld Lang-syne” may give some idea of the music of antiquity. The more advanced seven-tone scale which prevails in the modern world is nearly taken from that of the musicians of classic Greece, who accompanied the singer’s voice on the eight-stringed lyre. Pythagoras, who first brought musical tones under arithmetical rule, had the curious fancy that the distances of the seven planets are related as the seven tones of the octave, an idea which still dimly survives among us in the phrase “music of the spheres.”

Modern music is thus plainly derived from ancient. But there has arisen in it a great new development. The music of the ancients scarcely went beyond melody. The voice might be accompanied by an instrument in unison or at an octave interval, but harmony as understood by modern musicians was as yet unknown. Its feeble beginnings may be traced in the middle ages, when musicians were struck by the effects got by singing two different tunes at once, when one formed a harmony to the other. It is still a joke among musicians to sing together in this old-fashioned way two absurdly incongruous tunes, for instance, “The Campbells are coming” and “The Vesper hymn,” so arranged that one makes a sort of accompaniment to the other. The old rounds and catches, still popular, thus make one part of the tune serve as a harmony for the other. The Roman church part-music, and the Protestant singing by the congregation, with the organ to accompany them, had great effect in making the change by which the mere melody of the ancients grew into the harmonized melody of the moderns. This great step once understood, the student can follow in the history of music its successive stages in part-singing and orchestral composition, in the church and the concert-room, till in the hands of the great composers of the last three centuries the full resources of modern musical art were developed.

The musical instruments of the present day may all be traced back to rude and early forms. The rattle and the drum are serious instruments among savages; the rattle has come down to a child’s toy with us, but the drum holds its own in peace and war. Above these monotonous instruments comes the trumpet, which, as has just been seen, brings barbaric music a long step further on. The pipe or flageolet appears in its simplest form in the common whistle, and is improved by holes, by which the player alters the length of the pipe so as to give several notes. From very remote times, and far and wide over the earth, the familiar pipe is found, played single or double, and sometimes blown with the nostril instead of the mouth. Already in the ancient world it was often provided with a skin wind-bag which made it into the bagpipe, or, held sideways and blown across the mouth-hole, it became the flute. Another way of bringing out a range of notes is seen in the Pan’s pipes, the row of reeds of different lengths, in old classic days associated with the grace of rural poetry, but now come down to sound the vulgar pipings of the street showman. In the modern orchestra, the cornet is a trumpet provided with stops. The clarionet is a development of the grass-stem with a vibrating slit or tongue such as children cut in the fields in spring. The whole class of musical instruments to which the harmonium belongs, work with these vibrating tongues, which by their name of “reeds” still keep up the memory of their origin. The organ carries out in the widest range and grandest proportions the principle of the simple pipe or whistle, so that there is scientific correctness in the disrespectful name of “kist o’ whistles” given it by the Scotch, who disliked its use in church. Not less primitive are the rudest forms in which stringed instruments appear. It is told in the Odyssey (xxi. 410) how the avenging hero, when he has strung his mighty bow compact of wood and horn, gives the stretched string a twang that makes it sing like a swallow in a soft tone beautifully. One might well guess that the strung bow of the warrior would naturally become a musical instrument, but what is more, it really is so used. The Damara in South Africa finds pleasure in the faint tones heard by striking the tight bowstring with a little stick. The Zulu despises the bow as a cowardly weapon, but he still uses it for music; his music-bow, shown in Fig. 75 a, has a ring slid along the string to alter the note, and is also provided with a hollow gourd acting as a resonator or sounding-box to strengthen the feeble twang. Next, looking at b in the figure, it is seen how the ancient Egyptian harp may have been developed from such a rude music-bow, the wooden back being now made hollow so as to be bow and resonator in one, while across it are strung several strings of different lengths. All ancient harps, Assyrian, Persian, even old Irish, were made on this plan, yet we can see at a glance that it was defective, the bending of the wooden back putting the strings out of tune. It was not till modern ages that the improvement was made of completing the harp with the front-pillar, as seen in c, which makes the whole frame rigid and firm. Looking at the three figures, it is seen how the course of invention was by gradual growth; the harp with the pillar could not have been first invented, for no men could have been so stupid as to go on making harps and leave out the front-pillar when once the idea of it had come into their minds. The harp, though now made more perfect than of old, is losing its ancient place in music; but the reason of this is easy to see, it has been supplanted by modern instruments which have come from it. The very form of a grand piano shows that it is a harp laid on one side in a case, and its strings not plucked with the fingers but struck with hammers worked from a keyboard. It is the latest development from the bowstring of the præhistoric warrior.

Dancing may seem to us moderns a frivolous amusement; but in the infancy of civilization it was full of passionate and solemn meaning. Savages and barbarians dance their joy and sorrow, their love and rage, even their magic and religion. The forest Indians of Brazil, whose sluggish temper few other excitements can stir, rouse themselves at their moonlight gatherings, when, rattle in hand, they stamp in one-two-three time round the great earthen pot of intoxicating kawi-liquor; or men and women dance a rude courting dance, advancing in lines with a kind of primitive polka step; or the ferocious war-dance is performed by armed warriors in paint, marching in ranks hither and thither with a growling chant terrific to hear. We have enough of the savage left in us to feel how Australians leaping and yelling at a corrobboree by firelight in the forest can work themselves up into frenzy for next day’s fight. But with our civilized notions it is not so easy to understand that barbarians’ dancing may mean still more than this; it seems to them so real that they expect it to act on the world outside. Thus among the Mandan Indians, when the hunters failed to find the buffalos on which the tribe depended for food, every man brought out of his lodge the mask made of a buffalo’s head and horns, with the tail hanging down behind, which he kept for such an emergency, and they all set to dance buffalo. Ten or fifteen masked dancers at a time formed the ring, drumming and rattling, chanting and yelling; when one was tired out he went through the pantomime of being shot with bow and arrow, skinned, and cut up; while another, who stood ready with his buffalo-head on, took his place in the dance. So it would go on, without stopping day or night, sometimes for two or three weeks, till at last these persevering efforts to bring the buffalo succeeded, and a herd came in sight on the prairie. The description and sketch of the scene will be found in Catlin’s North American Indians. Such an example shows how, in the lower levels of culture, men dance to express their feelings and wishes. All this explains how in ancient religion dancing came to be one of the chief acts of worship. Religious processions went with song and dance to the Egyptian temples, and Plato said that all dancing ought to be thus an act of religion. In fact, it was so to a great extent in Greece, as where the Cretan chorus, moving in measured pace, sang hymns to Apollo, and in Rome, where the Salian priests sang and danced, beating their shields, along the streets at the yearly festival of Mars. Modern civilization, in which sacred music flourishes more than ever, has mostly cast off the sacred dance. To see this near its old state the traveller may visit the temples of India, or among the lamas of Tibet watch the mummers in animal masks dancing the demons out, or the new year in, to wild music of drums and shell-trumpets. Remnants of such ceremonies, come down from the religion of England before Christian times, are still sometimes to be seen in the dances of boys and girls round the Midsummer bonfire, or of the mummers at Yuletide; but even these are dying out. The dances of choristers in plumed hats and the dress of pages of Philip III.’s time, still performed before the high altar of Seville Cathedral, are now among the quaintest relics of a rite all but vanished from Christendom. Even sportive dancing, as a graceful exercise, is falling off in the modern world. The pictures from ancient Egypt show that the professional dancers were already skilful in their art, which perhaps reached its highest artistic pitch in classic Greece and Rome. Something of the old-fashioned picturesque village-dancing may still be seen at festivals in most countries of Europe except England, but the ball-room dances of modern society have lost much of the old art and grace.

At low levels in civilization it is clear that dancing and play-acting are one. The North American dog-dance and bear-dance are mimic performances with ludicrously faithful imitations of the creatures’ pawing and rolling and biting. So the scenes of hunting and war furnish barbarians with subjects for dances, as when the Gold Coast negroes have gone out to war, and their wives at home dance a fetish-dance in imitation of battle, to give their absent husbands strength and courage. Historians trace from the sacred dances of ancient Greece the dramatic art of the civilized world. Thus, in the festivals of the Dionysia, the wondrous life of the Wine-god was danced and sung, and from its solemn hymns and laughable jests arose tragedy and comedy. In the classic ages the player’s art divided into several branches. The pantomimes kept up the earliest form, where the dancer acted in dumb show such pieces as the labours of Herakles, or Kadmos sowing the dragon’s teeth, while the chorus below accompanied the play by singing the story; the modern pantomime ballets, which keep up remains of these ancient performances, show how grotesque the old stage gods and heroes must have looked in their painted masks. In Greek tragedy and comedy the business of the dancers and chorus was separated from that of the actors, who recited or chanted each his proper part in the dialogue, so that the player could now move his audience by words of passion or wit, delivered with such tone and gesture as laid hold on all who listened and looked. Greek tragedy, once begun, soon reached its height among the fine arts, so that the plays of Æschylos and Sophokles are read as examples of the higher poetry, and the modern acted imitations like the Phèdre of Racine give an idea of their power when the genius of the actors can rise to their height of emotion. The modern drama belongs not so much to the sacred mystery-plays of the middle ages as to the classic revival or renaissance of four centuries ago. Those who have seen the ruins of classic theatres at Syracuse, or on the hill-side of Tusculum, will best understand how a modern playhouse shows its Greek origin not only in the arrangement, but in the Greek names of its parts—the theatre, or spectators’ place, which still keeps its well-planned horse-shoe shape; the scene with its painted background and curtain in front; while the orchestra or dancing-place, which was formerly for the chorus, is now given up to the musicians. The change in the tragedy and comedy performed in the modern theatre from those of the classic world is partly due to their having dropped the stiff solemn declamation which belonged to them while they were still religious ceremonies, and their personages divine. In the hands of modern dramatists, of Shakspere above all, the characters came to be more human, though representing human nature in its most picturesque extremes, and life in its intensest moments. Modern plays are not indeed bound to be strictly natural, but can still call in the supernatural, as where now fairies or angels may hover over the scene where in classic days the gods used to pass in mid-air borne in their machines. In the modern comedy the persons dress and talk as near as may be like daily life; yet, even here, when the audience gravely fall in with the pretence that some of the speeches, though spoken aloud, are “asides” not heard by the actors close by, this shows that the modern world has not lost the power to make-believe, on which all dramatic art is founded.

On this same power of make-believe or imagination are founded the two other fine arts, sculpture and painting. Their proper purpose is not to produce exact imitations, but what the artist strives to bring out is the idea that strikes the beholder. Thus there is often more real art in a caricature done with a few strokes of the pencil, or in a rough image hacked out of a log, than in a minutely painted portrait, or a figure at a waxwork show which is so like life that visitors beg its pardon when they walk up against it. The painter’s and sculptor’s art seems to have arisen in the world from the same sort of rude beginnings which are still to be seen in children’s attempts to draw and carve. The sheets of bark or skins on which barbarous tribes have drawn men and animals, guns and boats, remind us of the slates and barn-doors on which English children make their early trials in outline. Many of these children will grow up and go through their lives without getting much beyond this childish stage. The clergyman of a country parish some years ago set the cottagers to amuse themselves with carving in wood such figures as men digging or reaping. They produced figures so curiously uncouth, and in style so like the idols of barbarous tribes, that they were kept as examples of the infancy of sculpture, and are now to be seen in the museum of Kew Gardens. Yet mankind, under favourable circumstances, especially with long leisure time on their hands, began in remote antiquity to train themselves to skill in art. Especially the sketches and carvings of animals done by the old cave-men of Europe have so artistic a touch that some have supposed them modern forgeries. But they are admitted to be genuine and found over a wide district, while forgeries which have been really done to palm off on collectors are just wanting in the peculiar skill with which the savages who lived among the reindeer and mammoths knew how to catch their forms and attitudes. Two of these ancient carvings are drawn in Figs. 3 and 4, and others in Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times. The art of colouring would naturally arise, for savages who paint their own bodies with charcoal, pipeclay, and red and yellow ochre, would daub their carved figures and fill in their outline drawings with the same colours. Travellers in Australia sheltering from the storm in caves, wonder at the cleverness of the rude frescos on the cavern-walls of kangaroos and emus and natives dancing, while in South Africa the Bushmen’s caves show paintings of themselves with bows and arrows, and the bullock-waggons of the white men, and the dreaded figure of the Dutch boer with his broad-brimmed hat and pipe. Among such people as the West Africans and Polynesians, the native sculptor’s best skill has been used on images of demons and gods, made to receive worship and serve as bodies in which the spiritual beings are to take up their abode. Thus the idols of barbarians, as specimens of early stages of sculpture, have a value in the history of art as well as of religion.

In the ancient nations of Egypt and Babylonia art had already risen to higher levels. Indeed Egyptian sculpture reached its best in the earlier rather than the later ages, for the stone statues of the older time stand and step with more free life in their limbs, and the calm proud faces of the colossal Thothmes and Rameses portraits (like Fig. 19) show the grandest ideal of an eastern despot, half tyrant, half deity. In the sculpture halls of the British Museum, it is seen that the early school of Egyptian sculptors were on their way to Greek perfection, but they stopped short. With trained mechanical skill they wrought statues by tens of thousands, hewing gigantic figures of the hardest granite and porphyry which amaze the modern stonecutter, but their art, bound by tradition, grew not freer but more stiff and formal. They might divide their plans into measured squares, and set out faces and limbs by line and rule, but their conventional forms seldom come up to the Greek lines of beauty, and their monuments are now prized, not as models of art, but as records of old-world history. In the British Museum also, the alabaster bas-reliefs that adorned the palace-courts of Nineveh give a wonderfully clear idea of what Assyrian life was like, how the king rode in his chariot, or let fly his arrows at the lion at bay, or walked with the state umbrella held over his head; how the soldiers swam the rivers on blown skins and the storming party scaled the fortress, while the archers shot down among them from the battlements, and the impaled captives hung in rows full in view outside the walls. But in such scenes proportion did not much matter if only the meaning were conveyed. It did not seem artistically absurd to the Assyrians to make archers so big that two fill a whole parapet; nor did the Egyptians feel the comic impression made on our modern minds by the gigantic figure of the king striding half across the battle-field and grasping a dozen pigmy barbarians at a grip, to slash their heads off with one sweep of his mighty falchion. It was in Greece that the rules of art were developed which reject the figures of the older nations as stiff in form and unlifelike in grouping. Greek art is sometimes written of as though it had itself begun in the rudest stage, with clumsy idols of wood and clay, till by efforts of their own surpassing genius the Greek sculptors came to hew in marble the forms which are still the wonders of the world. But great as Greek genius was, it never did this. The Greek nations had been for ages in contact with the older civilizations of the Mediterranean; their starting-point was to learn what art could do in Egypt, Phœnicia, Babylonia, and then their genius set them free from the hard old conventional forms, leading them to model life straight from nature, and even to fashion in marble shapes of ideal strength and grace. The Egyptian sculptors would not spoil polished granite with paint, but many of their statues were coloured, and there are traces of paint left on the Assyrian sculptures and on Greek statues, so that we are apt to have a wrong idea of a Greek temple, as though its marble gods and goddesses used to be of the glaring whiteness of a modern sculpture-gallery. The Greek terra-cotta statuettes in the British Museum are models of antique female grace in form and costume, only wanting the lost colour restored to make them the prettiest things in the world.

In colour-drawing, or painting, the Egyptian wall-paintings show a style half-way between the lowest and the highest. Here the scenes of old Egyptian life are caught at their characteristic moments, the shoemaker is seen drawing his thread, the fowler throwing at the ducks, the lords and ladies feasting and the flute-players and tumblers performing before them. Yet with all their clever expressiveness, the Egyptian paintings have not quite left behind the savage stage of art. In fact they are still picture-writings rather than pictures, repeating rows of figures with heads, legs, and arms drawn to pattern, and coloured in childish daubs of colour—hair all black, skin all red-brown, clothing white, and so on. The change from these to the Greek paintings is surprising; now we have no more rows of man-patterns, but grouped studies of real men. The best works of the Greek painters are only known to moderns by the admiring descriptions of the ancients, but more ordinary specimens which have been preserved give an idea what the paintings of Zeuxis and Apelles may have been. The tourist visiting for the first time the museum of Naples comes with a shock of surprise in face of Alexander of Athens’ picture of the goddesses at play, the boldly drawn frescos of scenes from the Iliad, and the groups of dancers elegant in drawing and colouring. Most of these pictures from Herculaneum and Pompeii were done by mere house decorators, but these tenth-rate Greek painters had the traditions of the great classic school, and they show plainly that from the same source we also have inherited the art of design. Modern European painting comes in two ways from ancient art. On the one hand, Greek painting spread over the Roman Empire and into the East, and for ages found its chief home in the Christian art of Constantinople, whence arose the Byzantine style, often called pre-Raffaelite, which though wanting in the older freedom of classic Athens, was expressive and rich in colour. On the other hand, when in the fifteenth century the knowledge of classic art and thought revived in Europe, the stiff pictures of saints and martyrs gave place to more natural and graceful forms, and modern painting arose under Raffaelle and Michael Angelo, Titian and Murillo, in whom the two streams from the fountain-head of Greek art, so long separated, joined again. The ancients mostly painted on walls like the present fresco-painting, or on waxed wooden panels; they did not know the use of oil to mix the ground colours with. This is just mentioned in the tenth century, so that the story of the brothers Van Eyck inventing oil-painting in the fifteenth century is not quite true. But they turned it to practical use, and from their time painters brought the substance and play of colour to a perfection which there is no reason to suppose the ancients ever approached. In modern times water-colour painting, used by the old masters for light sketches and studies, has also become an art of itself, especially in England. One branch of painting in which the moderns unquestionably surpass the ancients is landscape. Of old, however admirably the figures might be drawn, the hard conventional mountains, forests, and houses behind were still in the picture-writing stage, they rather stood as signs of the world outside than depicted it as it is. But now the artist’s eyes are turned on nature, which he renders with a truthfulness unknown to the old masters who first gave living form to gods and heroes, apostles and martyrs.

Something has now to be said of games, for play is one of the arts of pleasure. It is doing for the sake of doing, not for what is done. One class of games is spontaneous everywhere, the sports in which children imitate the life they will afterwards have to act in earnest. Eskimo children play at building snow huts, and their mothers provide them with a tiny oil-lamp with a bit of wick to set burning inside. Among the savages whose custom it is to carry off their wives by force from neighbouring tribes, the children play at the game of wife-catching, just as with us children play at weddings with a clergyman and bridesmaids. All through civilization, toy weapons and implements furnish children at once play and education; the North American warrior made his boy a little bow and arrow as soon as he could draw it, and the young South Sea Islander learnt by throwing a reed at a rolling ring how in after-life to hurl his spear. It is curious to see that when growing civilization has cast aside the practical use of some ancient contrivance, it may still survive as a toy, as where Swiss children to this day play at making fire by the old-world plan of drilling one piece of wood into another; and in our country lanes the children play with bows and arrows and slings, the serious weapons of their forefathers.

It is not quite easy to say whether man in a low savage state ever goes beyond these practical sports, and invents games of mere play. But higher up in civilization, such games are known from very ancient times. A trifling game, if it exactly takes hold of the playful mind, may last on in the world almost for ever. The ancient Egyptians, as their old paintings show, used to play our childish game of hot-cockles, where the blind-man who stoops down has to guess who thumped him on the back. These Egyptians played also the game of guessing the sum of the fingers held up by the two players, which is still popular in China, and in Italy, where one hears it half the night through with shouts of “three!” “seven!” “five!” “mora!”; it is a pity we have not this as a children’s game in England, for it trains a sharp eye and a quick hand. While some of our games, such as hoops and whipping-tops, have gone on in the Old World for thousands of years, others are modern importations; thus it was only about Stuart times that English children learnt from the Chinese, or some other nation in the far East, the art of flying kites. Or modern sports may be late improvements on old ones; the split shank-bones fastened under the shoes for going on the ice delighted the London ’prentices for centuries before they were displaced by steel skates. How a game may sometimes go on for ages unchanged, and then suddenly turn into a higher form, is curiously seen in the game of ball. The ancients tossed and caught balls like children now, and a famous Greek and Roman lad’s game was “common ball,” where there were two sides, and each tried to get the ball and throw it to the opposite goal. This is still played in a few country-places in England; its proper name is “hurling,” and football with the great leather ball is a variety of it. The ancients never seem to have used a stick or bat in their ball-play. But some 1,000 or 1,500 years ago the Persians began to play ball on horseback, which of course could only be done with a long stick, mallet, or racket; in this way there came into existence the fine sport of chaugán, which has lasted ever since in the East, and lately established itself in England under the name of polo. When once the club or racket had been invented for horseback, it was easy to use it on foot, and thus in the middle ages there began the whole set of games in which balls are hit with bats, such as pall-mall and croquet, tennis, hockey and golf, rounders and cricket.

Indoor games, too, have their curious history. Throwing lots or dice is far too ancient for any record to remain of its beginning, and the very draught-boards and men which the old Egyptians used to play on are still to be seen. The Greeks and Romans were draught-players, but their games were not like our modern game of draughts. On the other hand our merells or morris belongs to an old classical group of games, and Ovid alludes to the childish game of tit-tat-to. These games are played in China as well, and it is not known at which end of the earth they were first devised. The great invention in intellectual games may have been made a thousand years or so ago, when some Hindu, whose name is lost, set to work upon the old draught-board and men, and developed out of them a war-game, where on each side a king and his general, with elephants, chariots, and cavalry, and the foot-soldiers in front, met in battle array. This was the earliest chess, which with some little change passed into the modern European chess that still holds pre-eminence among sports, taxing the mind to its utmost stretch of foresight and combination. Our modern draughts is a sort of simplified chess, where the pieces are all pawns till they get across the board and become queens. The story in the history-books that cards were invented in France to amuse Charles VI. is a fiction, for they were known in the East centuries earlier. But at any rate the Europeans make with them combinations of skill and chance which excel anything contrived by their Asiatic inventors. Games which exercise either body or mind have been of high value in civilization as trainers of man’s faculties. Games of pure chance played for money stand on quite a different footing; they have been from the first a delusion and a curse. In our own time, there is perhaps no more pitiable sign of the slowness with which scientific ideas spread, than to hear the well-dressed crowds round the gaming-table at Monaco talking about runs of luck, and fancying that it makes a difference whether one backs the black or the red. This goes on although schoolboys are now taught the real doctrine of chances, and how to reckon the fixed percentage of each week’s stakes that will be raked in by the croupier, and not come back.