THE subject of Popular Amusements, if we may trust to the evidence of book-catalogues, has hitherto been very imperfectly discussed. Of histories and treatises, indeed, classical or archæological, there is a sufficient supply; what is needed is examination of the question in all its bearings, from a social and ethical point of view. We desire to know, not so much the form of public recreations at different eras and among various nations, as the spirit which has actuated them, and the effect they have produced upon the character of mankind. We would have their physiognomy and philosophy more closely scrutinized, especially at the present moment, when the topic of public amusements seems likely to press itself on the attention of those who make and of those who obey the laws.

has been too hastily assumed that common life wore a melancholy aspect among the Egyptians; and their oppressive ritual and sovereign priesthood have the credit of rendering them spiritless and sad. But the insight which their sculptures afford into their interior life, acquits both the people and its rulers from this imputation. They had, it is true, no theatre like the Greeks, and no circus like the Romans; and their religious festivals were not diversified, like the Olympian and Pythian games, by exhibitions of strength and skill. The life of the people, however, was far from being monotonous. In the grottoes of Benihassan, on which the sports and pastimes of Egypt are so vividly depicted, we find not only representations of martial exercises, but also games carried on by men and women, evidently intended for The amusements of the people in early the amusement of spectators. There are stages of civilization are naturally martial jugglers, often females, playing with balls, in their character, and are mostly reflec- sometimes as many as six at once, and entions of war and the chase. The effeminate gaged in gymnastical exercises, that evince Lydians are said to have been the invent- a wonderful control and suppleness of ors of sedentary games; but the monu- limbs. Many of the contortions exhibited ments of Egypt and Assyria attest the a few years since by the Arabs at the active energies of their inhabitants. It London theatres, were practised by these

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and the coarse ostentation of wealth, reflected the image of a nomade encampment. Vast parks were inclosed within the walls of Babylon, and sheep and oxen grazed in multitudes in the heart of Nineveh. Beyond their precincts, except in that Mesopotamian district called the garden of Chaldæa, enormous and arid plains stretched on every side, and since vegetation extended but a little beyond the banks of the Euphrates, population was scanty, and it was often a day's journey from one village to another. The character of the people corresponded to that of their land. Both the Hebrew and Greek writers agree in describing them as a fierce, grave, and violent race; with faces like an eagle's, with hair like lions, terrible as archers, wasteful as locusts, and more to be dreaded than the wolf or the hyena. Their sculptures represent them as rending the lion and the bear, and surrounded by the symbolisms of a race conversant with the hardy life of shepherds

Coptic tumblers. In these feats, the | his cities, although notorious for license women are dressed in tight pantaloons. The flinging the jereed, in which the Saracens were so expert, was an Egyptian pastime; but with this difference, that at Granada and Bagdad it was performed on horseback, whereas in Egypt it was performed in boats impelled by strong rowers. The Thames in the sixteenth century exhibited a similar spectacle, and the London 'prentices often disturbed the equanimity of sober citizens by hurling or thrusting blunt javelins against their stately barges. Professor Anderson might have met with his match in Egypt, where the jugglers were as adroit as the wizards; and no Neapolitan at the present day plays the game of mora with more eagerness or livelier gesticulations than the Egyptians played at even and odd. Dice are at least four thousand years old, since they have been found marked in the modern manner at Thebes; and drafts colored green and yellow, and arranged in lines along a board are represented at Benihassan. It would seem that the two latter games were favorites with the Egyptian clergy, owing doubtless to the tranquil and meditative turn of mind required for such pastimes. The recreations of Thebes and Memphis did not, like the Grecian panegyries, elevate or refine the taste of the people; but neither do they imply either melancholy or indolence in either exhibitors or spectators. If we are to judge of their disposition by their sculptures, we can hardly believe in the existence of a cheerful Assyrian. Those aquiline countenances seem to defy risus jocosque. We can imagine the Sphynx relaxing into a smile, and even Memnon laughing on such particular occasions as the Feast of Lamps, when all Egypt was on the river, and as bousy as a piper. There was, indeed, an essential difference in the lands of Cham and Ninus. In the Nile valley, fringed on each side by a desert, the population was close packed in towns, and the wits of men were sharpened by constant attrition with one another. Provision was also plentiful, since the Egyptians generally were vegetarians, and leguminous plants grew rapidly in the teeming mud of Nilus. Neighborhood and abundance incline people to recreation, and even the numerous festivals of the calendar were antidotes to sadness. Whereas the Assyrian was little more advanced in civilization than the pastoral races which still occupy upper Asia. Even

bronzed by the morning frost and the noonday sun, tense in fibre, eager of eye, with sinewy chests and dilated nostrils, scenting the battle from afar. It is not among such a nation that we should seek for popular amusements. On the eastern verge of Asia, we come upon people whom travellers have not unfrequently, although inaccurately, compared to the Egyptians. The Chinese resemble the inhabitants of the Nile valley, in the burdensome character of their ceremonies, and in the sluggish permanence of their customs. It requires an effort of the ima gination to picture to ourselves a youthful Chinese. From his cradle and swaddlingclothes, he is the slave of prescription. The spontaneous impulses of his childhood are repressed by education, and the recreations of his manhood are grave, solemn, and ungenial. No feeling of the beautiful is apparent in any of his pursuits or productions; he paints, designs, and carves as his forefathers did centuries ago; his demeanor and ordinary speech are regulated by strict laws; and what is not written in the books of the wise, is not permitted to be done or said without a serious breach of law and decorum. There is indeed a certain impressive grandeur in many of his festivals, in his prayers at the tomb of his ancestors, his ever-burning lamps, and his reverence for what his teachers have prescribed or time has hal

lowed. But China is not the land of of Themistocles to excuse himself for his cheerfulness: even its amusements bear a inability to play on the flute. It was conweighty and a serious brow; and the land sidered unbeseeming a citizen to be inexpresents the aspect which the Greeks at- pert in any warlike or manly accomtributed to their Hades-a land where all plishment, and the Greek admiration for things always seem the same, and where physical beauty rendered indispensable the sports and exercises of youth afford the exercises that develop the muscles, no pleasure, and admit of no variety. or give precision to the eye and the hand. Throughout Asia, indeed, an air of melan- The instincts of the people were nurtured choly prevails, which is not wholly attri- by the habits of their daily life. It was for butable to the civil or spiritual despotism women to be sedentary, because, accordof its rulers and its castes. Man in those ing to the erroneous notions of her masregions is a weed; he is dwarfed by the ter, she was a slave. But an indolent or colossal scale on which nature works: his invalid man was a prodigy and a laughingreligions are ancient, monumental, elabor- stock; and some of Plato's keenest satire ate, and cruel; his philosophy is ascetic is pointed against the self-indulgence of and contemplative; and his recreations the sophists who sat by the stove and partake of the earnest and sombre genius lapped themselves in cloaks and blankets. of his creeds, traditions, and institutions. The ceremonials of the Christian Church It is from the inventive and practical have, in all ages, commanded the applause sons of Hellas that we must seek for the of the artist and attracted the admiration true theory and example of popular amuse- of the vulgar. But the most gorgeous ments. The Greeks were the first to an- festivals of the Roman and Byzantine nounce the law of education-that it should priesthood are ignoble beside the Olympic consist in nearly equal proportion of the Games or the Greek Panegyries of Athens arts which elevate the mind and the exer- and Delos. In the one the symbolisms of cises which strengthen the body. The religion affect the faith or imagination only combination of the musical with the of the spectators, who gazed, a profane gymnastic was first displayed in the pub- herd, upon the drama of the sanctuary, lic games of Greece, and was repeated in but were not permitted to take part in the the daily life of every Grecian common- performance. The worship of the Greeks wealth. So salient a feature was this of was of a more catholic and ennobling kind. Hellenic manners, that we find Paul of No freeman was excluded from the conTarsus drawing from the race-course one tests of the arena: the cost of the chariot of his liveliest and most expressive illus- race, indeed, restricted its full enjoyment trations, and Plato preluding so many of to the wealthy, but, at least in the earlier his dialogues with references to the palæs- and better days, the manly exercises of tra, the stadium, and the sports that ac- the Pentathlon were open to the young, companied the festivals of Pallas, Apollo, the vigorous, and the handsome. Godlike and Ceres. "All pastimes," says Roger and heroic men were esteemed the best Ascham, generally, which be joyned exponents of the bounty and providence with labour and in open place, and on the of the gods; and Apollo was venerated day-lighte, be not only comelie and decent, not only as the giver of light and health, but verie necessarie for a courtly gentle- but also as the model of manly strength man ;" and the Greeks, although they ad- and grace. It was a decline both in art mitted a certain coarseness of speech and and in national feeling, when the boxers action, which the greater decency or the and wrestlers became merely professional better regulated hypocrisy of modern life artists, trained and dieted like our tumprohibits, were, in comparison with other blers and prize-fighters to feats of agility contemporary nations, a race of "courtly and strength, and sacrificing the music, gentlemen." It was deemed discreditable that is, the intellectual portion of their for any one above the condition of a slave abilities, to the gymnastic or physical. or a barbarian, to be unable to express The Crotoniate Milo, whose stalwart arms himself in society or in public with free- could rive an oak, or whose brawny shouldom and ease upon any topic of discus- ders could carry off an ox, was deeply sion he was deemed awkward and ill-versed in the science of Pythagoras, and trained who could not add to the convivi- was applauded by the spectators as the ality of the table by song or recitation; mortal representative of the beautiful and it needed all the fame and ingenuity sons of Leda. The religion of the Greeks.

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and oppressive despotism of the Byzantine Caesars. The games of the hippodrome were no substitute for the periodi cal festivals at Elis and the Isthmus. The charioteers of the green and blue factions were hirelings; the body-guards of Justinian and Alexius were recruited in Britain and the Rhine-land, and the flower of Grecian life drooped and dwindled in the unwholesome atmosphere of the bar and the Church.

carefully watched over three principal | fleet or the phalanx. The ancient spirit, objects of petition in the prayers of the however, did not wholly die, until the Church; nor was its care limited to verbal Hellenic race itself expired under the lazy petition, or were the worshippers contented with periodical acknowledgment that the well-being of man consists in a judicious regulation of "mind, body, and estate." The mind was cared for by the combination of intellectual with gymnastic exhibitions; and the audience at Elis or Corinth expected with as much eagerness the song in honor of the conqueror, as the feats which obtained for him the laurel or parsley coronal. The body was regarded as well by the exercises which fostered its vigor, grace, and suppleness, as by the temperance in all things which whosoever contended for the prize must observe. And the estate was also an object of solicitude, since temperance and hardihood are incompatible with luxury and sloth. We may affect to smile or sigh at the shallowness or incongruity of the creed of Greece, but we must plush at the practice of the worshippers of Zeus and Athéne. It is needless to expatiate on the artistic genius of the Greeks further than to note its intimate connection with the manly character of the people. The town of Sicyon was probably not more extensive than the least of the provincial capitals of England, yet it contained, if we may credit Pausanias, more master-pieces of art than at this moment can be found in all London. The models of the artist were not far to seek. The streets, the market-place, and the gymnasium afforded them; and the long conservation of physical beauty, which survived the extinction of freedom, is to be ascribed to the passion of the Greeks for gymnastic discipline. The traces of this passion are visible in the latest ages of Hellenic literature. Lucian, Plutarch, and Dion Chrysostom dwell on the vigor and beauty of the race in their time, and generally couple their commendations of natural graces with allusions to the training-schools or the public games. The noblest of the Greek writers, indeed, deplore the comparative decline of their countrymen in physical qualities, and ascribe the inferiority of their contemporaries to departure from the hardy habits of their forefathers. Aristophanes contrasts the curled darlings of his time with the big, brawny men who fought with the Persians at Salamis and Platea; and Demosthenes taunts his hearers with their reluctance to serve their country in the

In the national amusements the gymnastic elements preponderated, and the proportion is just, since it is not desirable that many men should devote themselves to literature, while it imports the general good that every member of the community should, unless physically disabled, be active, healthy, and brave. For the musical or intellectual element the Greeks thought that they had provided abundantly by the Dionysiac festivals; and assuredly the Drama has never assumed a more august and imposing form than it presented yearly at Athens. We are not insensible to the ampler and nobler dimensions of the Romantic Drama as compared with the Classical, nor disinclined to admit that in Shakspeare's and Calderon's plays a more profoundly religious, or rather a more profoundly humane, element exists than is to be found in the Oresteia or the Antigone. Viewed, however, in the light of popular amusements, the palm must be awarded to the Greek Drama. The scrupulousness or superstition of the Church has unfortunately divorced the Theatre from the ritual or the dogmas of religion; or when they have occasionally entered into co-partnership, as in the instances of Calderon's Autos and Racine's scriptural tragedies, the union has been brief and unfavorable to the more popular objects of the drama. The hostility of the Church to the Theatre commenced with the just repugnance of all wise and good men to the atrocities of the Roman stage. The coarseness and license in which Aristophanes occasionally indulges, would have appeared faint and feeble to a Roman inured to the representations at the Megalesian and Floral Games; and if the libels of Procopius contain any admixture of truth, the impurities of Rome were far surpassed by those of Constantinople. The antagonism of the

Church to the Theatre was accordingly | races in the art of rendering the masses just in its origin, but it has been prejudi- intelligent, healthy, and alert. cial equally to dramatic art and to popular recreation. At the Dionysiac festivals of Greece they went hand in hand-art was ennobled, recreation acquired an ethical importance, and the creed of the people was presented under the attractive forms of solemn and purifying emotions. In the fables of Edipus, Electra, and Antigone, the presence of a spiritual power, righting the secret wrongs, appalling the guilty, and justifying the innocent, was made manifest; nor could any attentive and thoughtful spectator depart from the representation of Prometheus without a conviction that the sacrifice of suffering is not less acceptable to the gods than the sacrifice of action. The Attic Drama was indeed the most superb and solemn liturgy of the Hellenic religion. The Greeks thus realized in their practice nearly every condition involved in the theory of popular amusements. They provided for the intellectual and physical improvement of the people, both locally and nationally. Their great panegyries were common to all who were not barbarians — i. e., to all who traced their ancestry from Pelops, Ion, and the Heracleids, or who, though of foreign attraction, were admitted-a rare privilege-for some signal service, into the family of Hellas; and their local institutions catered for the health, instruction, and cheerfulness of the several communities. The civilization of Christendom has, in some respects, advanced beyond that of the Hellenic race. It has improved, though it is still very far from apprehending, the proper relations and position of women; it has generally abolished slavery, although the change from myriads of slaves to myriads of paupers is a brief step only in the right direction, and is at Imentable variance with the doctrines of a religion professing to regard all men as brethren and wealth as dross. It has established munificent public charities, which were known in a rude form only to antiquity, and embraced freemen alone; and if it has not extirpated, it has ceased to countenance openly such anomalous vices as disgraced even the best ages of Greece and Rome. But the parallel must here break off. No Christian state has hitherto desired or affected a system of public education worthy to be put in the scale with that of Grecce. We have yet much to learn from both the Dorian and Ionian

The virtues of the Romans, which elicited the applause of the most ethical of historians, were civil and political rather than intellectual. Polybius, who had beheld the arts and refinements of Greece unimpaired by conquest and unvitiated by neglect, preferred to them the hardy Roman qualities of legislation and government. The most accomplished of the Latin poets agreed with the grave historian in this estimate of his countrymen, and bade them leave to others the sculptor's and the painter's art, and devote themselves to law, administration, and agriculture. In whatsoever related to art and education, indeed, Rome, as compared with Greece, or even Etruria, was rude and uninventive, and even on its colossal roads and aqueducts is impressed the stamp of material energy more than of grace or contrivance. The popular amusements of Rome reflected the practical genius of its people. They were symbolic of war and agriculture. The games of the circus mimicked the strife of the battlefield, and the vernal and autumnal, festivals represented, by their altars of sod and their garlands of flowers, the simple thanksgivings of the tillers of the soil. Even from the earliest times, an ethical, and not an artistic spirit, is visible in their recreations, and in the seasons of relaxation they indulged in mementos of the precariousness of life. Of all Roman exhibitions, the secular games were, both from their occasion and their ceremonial, the most suggestive of sad and sober thoughts. They were celebrated, in compliance with a cyclical computation of the Etruscans, once only in a hundred or a hundred and ten years: the ambition or policy of the Caesars, indeed, sometimes abridged the regular term; but even a jubilee, occurring once only in fifty years, is well adapted to inspire the spectators with solemn reflections. The usual interval, however, between the secular games exceeded the ordinary term of life; and as none of the spectators had already seen them, none could flatter themselves with the hope of beholding them again. The sacrifices were performed during the nights on the banks of the Tiber; the darkness was dispelled by innumerable lamps and torches, and the proper silence of the hour was broken by music and dancing. Heralds, some days before the