ul
acquiescence in disappointment and defeat that are of no small value in
the formation of character, and when they are not associated with
gambling they have often the inestimable advantage of turning young men
away from vicious pleasures. At the same time it can hardly be doubted
that they hold an exaggerated prominence in the lives of young
Englishmen of the present generation. It is not too much to say that
among large sections of the students at our Universities, and at a time
when intellectual ambition ought to be most strong and when the
acquisition of knowledge is most important, proficiency in cricket or
boating or football is more prized than any intellectual achievement. I
have heard a good judge, who had long been associated with English
University life, express his opinion that during the last forty or fifty
years the relative intellectual position of the upper and middle classes
in England has been materially changed, owing to the disproportioned
place which outdoor amusements have assumed in the lives of the former.
It is the impression of very competent judges that a genuine love,
reverence and enthusiasm for intellectual things is less common among
the young men of the present day than it was in the days of their
fathers. The predominance of the critical spirit which chills
enthusiasm, and still more the cram system which teaches young men to
look on the prizes that are to be won by competitive examinations as the
supreme end of knowledge, no doubt largely account for this, but much
is also due to the extravagant glorification of athletic games.

If we compare the class of pleasures I have described with the taste for
reading and kindred intellectual pleasures, the superiority of the
latter is very manifest. To most young men, it is true, a game will
probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure
the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine
scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would
not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very
many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural
love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified
this predominant passion. But while the tastes which require physical
strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It
is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most
easily satisfied, one of the