s tedious, be the theme horses or octavos.

Not one-tenth part of the requisite amount has yet been said of athletic
exercises as a prescription for this community. There was a time when
they were not even practised generally among American boys, if we may
trust the foreign travellers of a half-century ago, and they are but
just being raised into respectability among American men. Motley says
of one of his Flemish heroes, that "he would as soon have foregone his
daily tennis as his religious exercises,"--as if ball-playing were then
the necessary pivot of a great man's day. Some such pivot of physical
enjoyment we must have, for no other race in the world needs it so
much. Through the immense inventive capacity of our people, mechanical
avocations are becoming almost as sedentary and intellectual as the
professions. Among Americans, all hand-work is constantly being
transmuted into brain-work; the intellect gains, but the body suffers,
and needs some other form of physical activity to restore the
equilibrium. As machinery becomes perfected, all the coarser tasks are
constantly being handed over to the German or Irish immigrant,--not
because the American cannot do the particular thing required, but
because he is promoted to something more intellectual. Thus transformed
to a mental laborer, he must somehow supply the bodily deficiency. If
this is true of this class, it is of course true of the student, the
statesman, and the professional man. The general statement recently made
by Lewes, in England, certainly holds not less in America:--"It is rare
to meet with good digestion among the artisans of the brain, no matter
how careful they may be in food and general habits." The great majority
of our literary and professional men could echo the testimony of
Washington Irving, if they would only indorse his wise conclusion:--"My
own case is a proof how one really loses by over-writing one's self
and keeping too intent upon a sedentary occupation. I attribute all my
present indisposition, which is losing me time, spirits, everything, to
two fits of close application and neglect of all exercise while I was at
Paris. I am convinced that he who devotes two hours each day to vigorous
exercise will eventually gain those two and a couple more into the
bargain."

Indeed, there is something involved in the matter far beyond any merely
physical necessity. All our natures need something more than mere bodily
exertion; they need bodily en