Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics scarce as the dodo bird; small boys did not then begin to dream of varsity initials when they put on their first pair of knickerbockers; scarcely a person on this side of the water had ever heard of a spiked shoe; and such a thing as a cinder path was unknown both here and abroad. Sport had not yet become important and had not acquired with us that quasi-fashionable significance which has made it at the same time one of the most blessed and one of the drollest phenomena of contempo– rary life. One could read about it in Bell's Life, but one generally did not read Bell's Life. Even in England there was much opposition to the growing cult of athleticism. Not even the par– ticipation in the new athletics of the socially eligible sufficed at first to make them appeal to the class that they appeal to now. The late Sir Leslie Stephen was referee at the first Oxford-Cambridge games; men of title competed, and the Tz°mes observed that "the sports were held in the presence of a vast number of persons, including some hundreds of the fair sex, who took a keen interest in the proceedings," but even this favorable beginning failed to gild the sport with sufficient prestige to dazzle down its opponents. The same cries were raised then that are raised to-day against football and rowing, and Mr. Wilkie Collins took pains to caricature the whole movement in his "Man and Wife."