Now the attendant turns two cocks at the back of the alcove, and holding a basin alternately under the cold and hot streams, floods us at first with a fiery dash, that sends a delicious warm shiver through every nerve; then, with milder applications, lessening the temperature of the water by semi-tones, until, from the highest key of heat which we can bear, we glide rapturously down the gamut until we reach the lowest bass of coolness.  The skin has by this time attained an exquisite sensibility, and answers to these changes of temperature with thrills of the purest physical pleasure.  In fact, the whole frame seems purged of its earthy nature and transformed into something of a finer and more delicate texture.

After a pause, the attendant makes his appearance with a large wooden bowl, a piece of soap, and a bunch of palm-fibres.  He squats down beside the bowl, and speedily creates a mass of snowy lather, which grows up to a pyramid and topples over the edge.  Seizing us by the crown-tuft of hair upon our shaven head, he plants the foamy bunch of fibres full in our face.  The world vanishes; sight, hearing, smell, taste (unless we open our mouth), and breathing, are cut off; we have become nebulous.  Although our eyes are shut, we seem to see a blank whiteness; and, feeling nothing but a soft fleeciness, we doubt whether we be not the Olympian cloud which visited lo.  But the cloud clears away before strangulation begins, and the velvety mass descends upon the body.  Twice we are thus “slushed” from head to foot, and made more slippery than the anointed wrestlers of the Greek games.  Then the basin comes again into play, and we glide once more musically through the scale of temperature.

The brown sculptor has now nearly completed his task.  The figure of clay which entered the bath is transformed into polished marble.  He turns the body from side to side, and lifts the limbs to see whether the workmanship is adequate to his conception.  His satisfied gaze proclaims his success.  A skilful bath-attendant has a certain aesthetic pleasure in his occupation.  The bodies he polishes become to some extent his own workmanship, and he feels responsible for their symmetry or deformity.  He experiences a degree of triumph in contemplating a beautiful form, which has grown more airily light and beautiful under his hands.  He is a great connoisseur of bodies, and could pick you out the finest specimens with as ready an eye as an artist.

I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias.  They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown.  Now, since the delusion of artists has been overthrown, and we know that Grecian Art is but the simple reflex of Nature—­that the old masterpieces of sculpture were no miraculous embodiments of a beau ideal, but copies of living forms—­we must admit that in no other age of the world has the physical Man been so perfectly developed.  The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia.  Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo.