sity distinctions and prizes--many of them farmer lads who have
scarcely tasted meat in their boyhood, but have been brought up on the
simple farinaceous food of the country. There was much force and meaning
in the quaint congratulatory telegram sent by a friend to a Cambridge
Senior Wrangler hailing from Scotland, "Three cheers for the parritge!"
And that curious and most impressive fact which Mr. Bayard, the late
American Ambassador, hunted up for our edification from various
dictionaries of biography--the fact, namely, that a large proportion of
our most eminent men spring from the homes of the poorer clergy, where
certainly sumptuous fare and much meat do not obtain, is a proof that
abstemious living, while forming a valuable discipline for the soul,
does not injure but promotes the health of the body and the strength of
the brain. Our having given up the religious uses of fasting I often
think is a loss to young men; and it might, therefore, be as well if we
were to imitate our "Corybantic" brethren, the Salvationists, and
institute a week of self-denial, leaving the children to work out an
economical dietary, with due care on our part that it should be fairly
nutritious, and allowing them to give what they have saved from the
ordinary household expenses to any cause in which they may be
interested. It would give them a wholesome lesson in self-denial and
cheap living; both lessons much needed in these luxurious days. But
whether this suggestion finds favor or not, we have always to bear in
mind that "plain living" is the necessary companion of "high
thinking"--the lowly earth-born twin who waits upon her heavenly sister.

On the vexed question of the use of alcohol there was but one point on
which there was a consensus of opinion in the discussion by our leading
medical men, which appeared some years ago in the pages of the
_Contemporary Review_. The point upon which they were all agreed was
that alcohol is injurious to children, and if the boy has been
accustomed from his early youth to do without it, and, as he grows up,
remains a total abstainer, there is no question that his abstinence will
prove a great safeguard; though I cannot go as far as some of my
abstaining friends, who seem to regard the use of alcohol as the root of
what must, in the nature of things, be one of the strongest primal
passions of human nature, and therefore liable to abuse, whether men are
total abstainers or not. Anyhow, though a lad ca