such accomplishments as would enable them to grace social life.
As to physical training, he provided instructors in military exercises, in riding, and in swimming, while he encouraged every form of healthy outdoor activity. In all this he was the typical humanist. The ecclesiastical schoolmaster of the middle ages was not concerned to encourage physical training; the opinion was rather that the body was something to be despised and mortified. The medieval provision for such training was not in schools but in the households of princes or nobles, where riding, tilting, the chase, and other martial or courtly exercises were practised. On the physical and the social sides of his scheme Vittorino was in some sort continuing this old court training; many of his pupils, indeed, were nobles destined to the profession of arms. But the idea which dominated his whole system was the classical, originally Greek, idea of an education in which mind and body should be harmoniously developed. No antique idea appealed with greater force to the humanists, since none presented a stronger contrast to medieval theory and practice. When we give the name of humanistic to the type of education established by Vittorino and his contemporaries, it is not simply or chiefly because the intellectual part of it was based on Greek and Latin, but, in a more important sense, because the education was at once intellectual, moral, and physical.
With reference to moral teaching, it should be
