But as far as mere air and exercise goes, the childish game of playing at horses is admirably calculated to increase health and vigour and needs no expensive resources.  Yet what would be said and thought if a prelate and his suffragan ran nimbly out of a palace gate in a cathedral close, with little bells tinkling, whips cracking, and reins of red ribbon drawn in to repress the curvetting of the gaitered steed?  There is nothing in reality more undignified about that than in hitting a little ball about over sandy bunkers.  If the Prime Minister and the Lord Chief Justice trundled hoops round and round after breakfast in the gravelled space behind the Horse Guards, who could allege that they would not be the better for the exercise?  Yet they would be held for some mysterious reason to have forfeited respect.  To the mind of the philosopher all games are either silly or reasonable; and nothing so reveals the stupid conventionality of the ordinary mind as the fact that men consider a series of handbooks on Great Bowlers to be a serious and important addition to literature, while they would hold that a little manual on Blind-man’s Buff was a fit subject for derision.  St. Paul said that when he became a man he put away childish things.  He could hardly afford to say that now, if he hoped to be regarded as a man of sense and weight.

I do not wish to be a mere Jeremiah in the region of prophecy, and to deplore, sarcastically and incisively, what I cannot amend.  What I rather wish to do is to make a plea for greater simplicity in the matter, and to try and destroy some of the terrible priggishness in the matter of athletics, which appears to me to prevail.  After all, athletics are only one form of leisurely amusement; and I maintain that it is of the essence of priggishness to import solemnity into a matter which does not need it, and which would be better without it.  Because the tyranny is a real one; the man of many games is not content with simply enjoying them; he has a sense of complacent superiority, and a hardly disguised contempt for the people who do not play them.

I was staying in a house the other day where a distinguished philosopher had driven over to pay an afternoon call.  The call concluded, he wished to make a start, so I went down to the stable with him to see about putting his pony in.  The stables were deserted.  I was forced to confess that I knew nothing about the harnessing of steeds, however humble.  We discovered portions of what appeared to be the equipment of a pony, and I held them for him, while he gingerly tried them on, applying them cautiously to various portions of the innocent animal’s person.  Eventually we had to give it up as a bad job, and seek for professional assistance.  I described the scene for the benefit of a lively lady of my acquaintance, who is a devotee of anything connected with horses, and she laughed unmercifully at the description, and expressed the contempt, which she sincerely felt, in no measured