the art, were integral parts of every gymnasium; and the Athenians went so far as to bestow on one famous ballplayer, Aristonicus of Carystia, a statue and the rights of citizenship.  The rough and hardy young Spartans, when passing from boyhood into manhood, received the title of ball-players, seemingly from the game which it was then their special duty to learn.  In the case of Nausicaa and her maidens, the game would just bring into their right places all that is liable to be contracted and weakened in women, so many of whose occupations must needs be sedentary and stooping; while the song which accompanied the game at once filled the lungs regularly and rhythmically, and prevented violent motion, or unseemly attitude.  We, the civilised, need physiologists to remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them.  Those old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on them.

But fair Nausicaa must have been—­some will say—­surely a mere child of nature, and an uncultivated person?

So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture of the very highest sort, full of “sweetness and light.”—­Intelligent and fearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her strange and sudden adventure, quick to perceive the character of Ulysses, quick to answer his lofty and refined pleading by words as lofty and refined, and pious withal;—­for it is she who speaks to her handmaids the once so famous words: 

   “Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus;
      And alms, though small, are sweet”

Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour, shrinking from the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses, bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens her wish that the Gods might send her such a spouse.—­This is Nausicaa as Homer draws her; and as many a scholar and poet since Homer has accepted her for the ideal of noble maidenhood.  I ask my readers to study for themselves her interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsley’s translation, or rather in the grand simplicity of the original Greek, {76} and judge whether Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imagined her—­or, it may be, drew her from life—­must have been a perfect gentleman; both complete in those “manners” which, says the old proverb, “make the man:”  but which are the woman herself; because with her—­who acts more by emotion than by calculation—­manners are the outward and visible tokens of her inward and spiritual grace, or disgrace; and flow instinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her inner nature.

True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write.  No more, most probably, could the author of the Odyssey.  No more, for that matter, could Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and manners, most highly-cultivated men.  Reading and writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to every human being, that he may start fair in the race of life.  But I am not aware that Greek women improved much, either in manners, morals, or happiness, by acquiring them in after centuries.  A wise man would sooner see his daughter a Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, or even an Hypatia.