I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty well acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less artistic; and have always found them singularly pleasing.  Any stroller must be dear to the right-thinking heart; if it were only as a living protest against offices and the mercantile spirit, and as something to remind us that life is not by necessity the kind of thing we generally make it.  Even a German band, if you see it leaving town in the early morning for a campaign in country places, among trees and meadows, has a romantic flavour for the imagination.  There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but his heart will stir a little at sight of a gypsies’ camp.  ’We are not cotton-spinners all’; or, at least, not all through.  There is some life in humanity yet:  and youth will now and again find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.

An Englishman has always special facilities for intercourse with French gymnasts; for England is the natural home of gymnasts.  This or that fellow, in his tights and spangles, is sure to know a word or two of English, to have drunk English aff-’n-aff, and perhaps performed in an English music-hall.  He is a countryman of mine by profession.  He leaps, like the Belgian boating men, to the notion that I must be an athlete myself.

But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of the artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not accustom him to high ideas.  But if a man is only so much of an actor that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of thoughts.  He has something else to think about beside the money-box.  He has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has an aim before him that he can never quite attain.  He has gone upon a pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there is no end to it short of perfection.  He will better upon himself a little day by day; or even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that once upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time he had fallen in love with a star. ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost.’  Although the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he should settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would move with a better grace, and cherish higher thoughts to the end?  The louts he meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey’s snood; but there is a reminiscence in Endymion’s heart that, like a spice, keeps it fresh and haughty.