ed algebra and geometry in the same time. But the
first boy has acquired much more than these poor games along with them.
He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find
out, as you did, that, when he rises from the game too long played, he
is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself. Thenceforward it takes
place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience. These
minor skills and accomplishments--for example, dancing--are tickets of
admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them
enables the youth to judge intelligently of much on which otherwise he
would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, "I have suffered more from my
bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life
put together." Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not
proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery,
swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of
power, which it is his main business to learn,--riding specially, of
which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, "A good rider on a good horse is as
much above himself and others as the world can make him." Besides, the
gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them,
secret freemasonries.

They are as if they belonged to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the
youth is, not amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to
remain to him occasions of heartburn. We are full of superstitions. Each
class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not: the refined, on rude
strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a
college-education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading
man in a leading city, who, having set his heart on an education at the
university and missed it, could never quite feel himself the equal
of his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy superiority to
multitudes of professional men could never quite countervail to him this
imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards pass to a
poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free
admission to them on an equal footing, if it were possible, only once or
twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run
away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run
back to their