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    burning out like a tod combustible firework in a poor forty minutes ; that tlie age was feverish and railway mad—that there was no "boxing as there used to be when Byron sparred with Jackson all the morning , then went to a . round of . '' parties , returning home at daybreak to drink his tenth bottle of soda water , and write « I / ara ; " that , in fact , every one and everything was grown effeminate , weaily , and degenerate . You would really have thought , to have listened to these old ravens of the Clpbs , with their dyed hair and their padded frockcoats , that wfi were grown such a poor set of weaklings and imbeciles , that all the Trench had to do was to land at the London Bocks , blow up St . Paul's , sack Fleet Street , and turn Westminster Abbey into an opera-house—no resistance from us being possible , or to be expected . They talked as if the Oeobge III . men were made of steel and we of wax ; as if their fingers were bigger than our legs ; as if the swords they wielded in the Peninsula it would take three of us to lift . The drastic influence of public school life and university gymnasiums , of universal boating and cricketing all over England , they ignored , saying that we now only played at what they ( the three bottle men ) used to work . In fact , when the old Haven left you and went to-his intellectual nightly rubber with old Colonel Hanger , Mr . Choker and Mr . Dummil , —rather stiff about the knees and a little indistinct in voice , you looked upon yourself as one of a disgraced and fallen race—one of England ' s Lower Empire , indeed . The spectre removed to the card-room—undismayed by his dyed hair , the carefully gummed on scalp , and the Regency bow ( even now so killing when in the " cold" manner , so fascinating when in a " warm " tone)—you begin , in the solitude of the lofty club smoking-room , to wonder if your old friend was really right . You , self-assertingly , strike out your hard y arms ; you kick , imaginary invaders with the powerful flexors and extensors of the . femur " that work like tough ropes ; you recall wrestling grapples in the country ; you remember fourteen hour rides and six hour walks . You begin to fee ! contradictory , and an advocate of the age ' s manhood ; you think of tremendous replies , that would have blown up the " Raven " as with a ten inch shell . ^ The next morning , as you roll from your bed-Hthe exact warmth of a mild summer morning- —into your broad shallow pan of a bath , breaking with a glassy crackle a slight silver paper surface of ice , you begin , however , quite to despise the " Raven , " and to grow less distrustful of the age . That same afternoon you get filially convinced ; by accidc :: t ? Jl v taking up Emerson ' s " English Tracts , " and finding that he , " as a clever , thoughtful , impartial 'American , who has seen the world , and with keen eyes too , says , " The English , at the present day , have great vigour of body and endurance . Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them , and invalids . They are bigger men than the Americans ; . " *• round , ruddy , an d ¦ handsome , " he goes on to add , " with a tendency to stout and powerful frames . " He boasts with the pride of a child talking of a father of how we English ride and walk faster than all other people ; how we hunt and trap and shoot all over the four hemispheres , and write sporting books for all the world . Does this look like degeneracy ? You reflect , and long to go to the club card-room at once , and silence the " Raven . " v Still ; , we are secretly so far of the Raven ' s opinion , that we think without more attention being paid to physical education the next generation must suffer . School is now such a serious affair ; hours of work increase , and drive up hours of play frightened into timid corners . " The use of the globes " is now no mei'e ostentation of our Yorkshire friend of Potheboys' Hall ; children now learn more sciences than they are years old . Young ladies are no longer confined to " Calisthenics and the Indian clubs , " but entangle themselves in Euclid ' s diagrams and dive deep into hydraulics . Even boys get an inkling of the turnpikegates of examination that must one day be passed before the pleasant , smiling Sinecure country is reached , and brace themselves for the leap . There is less play in life ; rainy days begin earlier in the year ; sunshine recedes back from the frontier of adolescence ; and the schoolmaster , worried by barking rivals and exacting parents , shortens the hours of recreation , and gets into tho habit of thinking every hour won from play a gain . With the great city population , now that hours are late , and fields shrink so sensitively from the advances of tho brick and mortar deluge , thore is more than ever fear of our young men growing up pale , flabby , and incapablo of sustained and vigorous exertion . Only imagine a city clerk now suddenly retiring , after the manner of the Greeks * to ' a disrobing room ' within , tho precincts of his bank , anointing his nudo body with . Macassar ' s balmy oil , and making a dash down King William-street , followed by fellow athletes , to plunge into the Thames from London-bridge stairs , ; when , of course , tho police would follow him in a boat , and take him off to the nearest sitting magistrate , as a lover of sana-. tory reform , who hijtasolf needed immeclioto moral reformation .

    Yet Plato , and all the wise men of Greece that we venerate , and spend half our youth learning to construe , would have refused to believe that any nation could exist whose striplings djfcl not oil themselves daily , wrestle and box , and race and leap , and after that betake themselves , red-hot and dusty , to the necessary bath . So Xenoph on was trained to become in his old age . a . fine , old , fresh Euba 3 an country gentleman . So Socrates learned to draw his wise saws from the grapples of the naked youths of Athens , as lie lay watching them under the dry . olive taeesj musical with the ceaseless cicada . Sudden alarms about sanatory neglect indicate the sense of the necessity of some change existing in the mind of the alarmist . It is always your puny 7 iomunculus friend , with no chest , thready voice and fishy eyes , who bores you about the use of the dumbbells , who beats his little band-box of a chest as he asserts that no man can live without boxing daily , and other self-evident fallacies . He is the man who tortures himself with cold water applied at uncomfortable and contrasting moments , who walks constitutionally when nobody else wants to walk , who gets quite fretful , noisy , and excited praising cold pump water , whorequests you to pinch his arm , who insults big draymen , who disdain to touch such a dollof a man , and who he , therefore , thinks he has cowed and intimidated . But this does not prove anything against physical education , for perhaps without these bodily mortifieatio " , Twitter would not now be alive to brag of his stamina . To laugh at exercise advocates because it produces Twitters , is as absurd and unfair as to argue that waterdrinkers are all invalids , because invalids generally have recourse , from sheer debility of constitution , to such cruel remedies for bodily incapacity as temperance or total abstinence . The body is the butt end of the mind , to use a military metaphor , and we think that , this rifle movement will help to strengthen it nationally , just now that we are all getting more sedentary and business-like than ever . Your self-complacent man may show us nervous Cowpers and fragile Popes ; but we find that iron men like Napoleon , and thinkers like the did soldier and stonecutter , Socrates , have really led and formed the world . In fact , bur opponent has . only-got . . to allow-as an hypothesis . that two brains are of equal capacity , aud it at once follows thafc-whichever brain is lucky enough to be backed up by the strongest body— . the body that can bear to sitv and think , and work , and act , and produce most in the day , will be the master of the lesser power—the conqueror of circumstances—the leader of men , and the victor in life ' s nice . . ¦ It is a small proof , yet we think-we see , eveii in the fact of * th « UirivC 7 onl introduction , within . the last ten years or so , of morning cold baths ,- an argument th . it either our young men need bracing more than they used to , or that they feel more tho necessity of being braced ; brains soften more than they used to do ; heart disease increases ; diet is workin « r on us ; doctors tell us that , as in Elizabeth's ' time , ' . sanguineous diseases ' worn paramount , and in the Georgian era gastric diseases ; so now , nervous diseases lead oft' the largest haul of victims into that dark region where the sun is not ; and therefore it is that we rejoice to see the lion youth of . England joining the volunteer ranks with such cheerful eagerness . They cannot , after the desk and the arm-chair , have too much of the goose-step , of standing-at-ease , of the drill generally . The lazy man , who can hardly be induced to walk a mile , can sometunes scarcely be stopped when he has walked two , so fond has he grown of tho exercise of which he was once so ignorant . It cannot hurt a man to make him strong on the leg aud sure of eye . The timid faults of envy and scandal will grow scarcer as men grow healthier . An hour ' s ' drill will restore Biiuisis . it an altered man to his poor little shrinking wife . As our national stomnoh improves in tone by exercise , our national temper will become , perhaps , more courteous and obliging . The British lion , then , will be less often mistaken for a bear . But one penalty for all these benefits we shall surely pay , and it requires no MisitUN to prophesy them—our club and social meetings , ibr a time , at least , will bo tormented with military jargon ; gun tackle will crowd every sitting-room in which you can take shelter from tho dreary monotonies of drill . Young men , vain of youth , arroyant of wealth that they really have , and intellect , which they only fancy they have , Avill s-tnit about tho streets with tho air of conquering C . ksars in " ( hiy" drosses , as much like real soldiers ua stage supernumeraries are , but in their own opinion ready to bury all the invading- French in Plmnstotul marshes , or to turn Clapham common into another crimson "Waterloo . But lut us bear all this in good pavt ; it is only tho smoke that precedes the l ) v »; and let us all bo quite sure that in tho hour of need or peril those sucking Am : x and Kits and beardless MarlbokoUQUS would rush on the enoiiiy s onimou ua bravely aa our threo hundred Liconjua . skh iIi . I m uliort timo ' au'O at Bnlaklavu .

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    Jan . , 1 . 860 . J The Leader and Saturday Analyst . 81

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Jan. 28, 1860, page 81, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2331/page/5/