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Updated: September 27, 2025
The Oriental bayadères, for instance, are trained from childhood as gymnasts: they carry heavy jars on their heads, to improve strength, gait, and figure; they fly kites, to acquire "statuesque attitudes and graceful surprises"; they must learn to lay the back of the hand flat against the wrist, to partially bend the arm in both directions at the elbow, and, inclining the whole person backward from the waist, to sweep the floor with the hair.
Beginning as the most promising pupils of the gymnasium, and becoming victors in the public games, certain gymnasts gradually grew into a distinct class of prize-runners, wrestlers, and fighters, called Athletes. They then devoted their lives to attaining excellence in these exercises, and withdrew to the palaestra, or training-school.
Paradise, according to Buonarroti's conception, was not meant for what is graceful, lovely, original, and tender. The hosts of heaven are adult and over-developed gymnasts. Yet, while we record these impressions, it would be unfair to neglect the spiritual beauty of some souls embracing after long separation in the grave, with folding arms, and clasping hands, and clinging lips.
That gentleman was a sort of Barnum, the director of a troupe of mountebanks, jugglers, clowns, acrobats, equilibrists and gymnasts, who, according to the placard, was giving his last performances before leaving the Empire of the Sun for the States of the Union. Passepartout entered and asked for Mr. Batulcar, who straightway appeared in person.
It is a formidable network of all kinds of societies, including military men and civilians, geographers and gymnasts, sportsmen and technologists, which rise up spontaneously, organize, federate, discuss, and explore the country. It is these voluntary and free associations that go to make the real backbone of the German army. Their aim is execrable. It is the maintenance of the Empire.
The jugglers tossed them in the air, threw them like shuttlecocks with wooden battledores, and yet they kept on spinning; they put them into their pockets, and took them out still whirling as before. It is useless to describe the astonishing performances of the acrobats and gymnasts. The turning on ladders, poles, balls, barrels, &c., was executed with wonderful precision.
He left Athens a lonely man, without founding a church. It was the last city in the world to receive his doctrines, that city of grammarians, of pedants, of gymnasts, of fencing masters, of play-goers, and babblers about words. "As well might a humanitarian socialist declaim against English prejudices to the proud and exclusive fellows of Oxford and Cambridge."
A squinting eye is a treasure to a boxer, a left-handed batter is a prize in a cricketing eleven, and one of the best gymnasts in Chicago is an individual with a wooden leg, which he takes off at the commencement of affairs, thus economizing weight and stowage, and performing achievements impossible except to unipeds.
A matter of twenty kilometres was a mere trifle for infantry troopers. They walked as lightly as gymnasts, under a clear sky, through the fields, guided by the lights in the farmhouses, and at nine o'clock, having passed the frontier, they stumbled upon a post of Cossacks ambuscaded behind a hedge!
Andrew Lackaday carrying on the traditions of his foster father, the clown Ben Flint, had remained with it, principal clown, to the very end. Now and then, rare passers through from the outer world, gymnasts down on their luck, glad to take a makeshift engagement while waiting for better things, had counselled him to leave the antiquated concern.
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