It is only in the circus or the gymnasium or the swimming-pool that we moderns are permitted to behold what was a daily spectacle to the Greeks; and it is because the circus preserves for us this occasional privilege that it deserves to survive. The jocularities of the clowns, the intricate evolutions of the trained animals, the golden glitter of the gorgeous cavalcades--all these are but the casual accompaniments of the essential privilege of the circus to present to us a succession of men and women, with their bodies in perfect condition, to exhibit to us that purely physical beauty which we are ever in danger of overlooking or even forgetting. These acrobats, slim and handsome, as Huck Finn found them, in their "shirts and drawers," may display their daring and their grace, standing on a circling steed or swinging from a flying trapeze, revolving on a horizontal bar or building themselves up into human pyramids on the bark of the arena; but, except for the sake of variety, the way in which they may choose to exhibit their skill and to show themselves is unimportant. What is important is that we may have the shifting spectacle of the human body in the highest condition of physical efficiency, delighting our eyes by obedience to the everlasting laws of beauty. While the Greeks had far more opportunities than are vouchsafed to us moderns to behold the human body exhibiting its strength and its skill in graceful play, we have the advantage that many of the most effective exercises are latter-day inventions. It seems unlikely that the Athenians and the Spartans, even tho they were horsemen, had attained to the art of bareback riding; they may have bestraddled a saddleless steed, but they had not learned how to stand on his back, and to turn somersets in time with the stride of the horse. It is, of course, possible that they were familiar with this, but no sculpture and no vase-painting, no anecdote in the works of the prose-writers, and no line of the lyrists survives to authorize us to believe it. And it is fairly certain, also, that they lacked the horizontal bar, which affords limitless possibilities to the adventurous acrobat of our own times, both when it is erected singly and when it is combined in sets of three, either fixed in the arena or raised aloft in the air to produce the appearance of a remoter ethereality.