The same thing was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

"From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends--
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends."

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.

But if, in any case, it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that
in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge
were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were
forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco
during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal