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fitted for them; but the play never goes off more finely, nor elicits more enthusiastic applause, than when the characters, even down to the most unimportant, have been personated by men of far greater ability than they have been required to display.

CHAPTER IV.

PHYSICAL CULTURE.

To the strong hand and strong head, the capacious lungs and vigorous frame, fall, and will always fall, the heavy burdens; and where the heavy burdens fall, the great prizes fall too. - LAWS OF LIFE.

It is said that the Duke of Wellington, when once looking on at the boys engaged in their sports in the playground at Eton, made the remark, "It was there that the battle of Waterloo was won!"-SAMUEL SMILES.

No man is in true health who cannot stand in the free air of heaven, with his feet on God's free turf, and thank his Creator for the simple luxury of physical existence. -T. W. HIGGINSON.

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HE first element of success needed by him who has wisely chosen his calling is constitutional talent. By constitutional talent we mean the warmth and vigor imparted to a man's ideas by superior bodily stamina, by a stout physical constitution. Till within a recent period, bodiculture, if it may be so called, has been neglected, and almost despised, in this country. Our books for the young have been full of praises of the midnight oil; our oracles of education have urged unsparing study; and Nocturna mane versate, versate diurna, has been the favorite motto in all our colleges. It has been truly Isaid that all the influences under which the young American, especially the student, of the last generation lived, taught him to despise the body, while the mind was goaded to a preternatural activity. They led him to associate muscle with rowdyism, ruddy cheeks with toddies, longwindedness with profane swearing, and broad shoulders with neglect of the ordinances of revealed religion. Tallness was the only sign of virtue tolerated. Width and weight were held to indicate a steady tendency toward the State Prison, and the model young man became pale, lanky, dyspeptic, desiring to be all soul, and re

garding his body as the source of all his wretchedness. It is true the majority of youth protested against this theory, and refused to be goaded to suicidal study; but not a few responded to the whip, with the results that are familiar to all. But within a few years a revolution has taken place in the public sentiment on this subject. We are beginning to see that the body, as well as the mind, has rights that must be respected. We are learning by bitter experience that if the mind, which rules the body, ever forgets itself so far as to trample on its slave, the slave will not forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor. We are discovering that though the pale, sickly student may win the most prizes in college, it is the tough, sinewy one who will win the most prizes in life; and that in every calling, other things being equal, the most successful man will be the one who has slept the soundest and digested the most dinners with the least difficulty. trine of Pascal, that "disease is the natural state of Christians," has now few believers. We cannot believe that the Creator thinks so; else health would be the exception, and disease the rule. We rather hold the opinion of Dr. J. W. Alexander, who, when asked if he enjoyed the full assurance of faith, replied, "I think I do, except when the wind is from the east."

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It is now conceded on all hands that the mind has no right to build itself up at the expense of the body; that it is no more justifiable in abandoning itself without restraint to its cravings, than the body in yielding itself to sensual indulgence. The acute stimulants, the mental drams, that produce this unnatural activity or overgrowth of the intellect, are as contrary to nature, and as hurtful to the man, as the coarser stimulants that unduly excite the body. The mind, it has been well said, should be a good, strong, healthy feeder, but not a glutton. When unduly stimulated, it wears out the mechanism of the body, like friction upon a machine not lubricated, and the growing weakness of the physical frame nullifies the power it encloses. "It is now generally conceded," says Henry Ward Beecher, in one of his late admirable lectures to the theological

students of Yale College, "that there is an organization which we call the nervous system in the human body, to which belong the functions of emotion, intelligence, and sensation, and that that is connected intimately with the whole circulation of the blood, with the condition of the blood as affected by the liver, and by aëration in the lungs; that the manufacture of the blood is dependent upon the stomach; so a man is what he is, not in one part or another, but all over; one part is intimately connected with the other, from the animal stomach to the throbbing brain; and when a man thinks, he thinks the whole trunk through. Man's power comes from the generating forces that are in him, namely, the digestion of nutritious food into vitalized blood, made fine by oxygenation; an organization by which that blood has free course to flow and be glorified; a neck that will allow the blood to run up and down easily; a brain properly organized and balanced; the whole system so compounded as to have susceptibilities and recuperative force; immense energy to generate resources and facility to give them - all these elements go to determine what a man's working power is."

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To do his work cheerfully and well, every professional man needs a working constitution, and this can be got only by daily exercise in the open air...The atmosphere we breathe is an exhalation of all the minerals of the globe, the most elaborately finished of all the Creator's works, the rock of ages disintegrated and prepared for the life of man. Draughts of this are the true stimulants, more potent and healthful than champagne or cognac, so cheap at the custom-house, so dear at the hotels." The thorough aëration of the blood by deep inhalations of air, so as to bring it in contact with the whole breathing surface of the lungs, is indispensable to him who would maintain that full vital power on which the vigorous workingpower of the brain so largely depends. Sydney Smith tells public speakers that if they would walk twelve miles before speaking, they would never break down. The English people understand this, and hence at the Universities boat-races,

horseback rides, and ten-mile walks are practically a part of the educational course. English lawyers and members of Parliament acquire vigor of body and clearness of head for their arduous labors by riding with the hounds, shooting grouse on the Scottish moors, throwing the fly into the waters of Norway, or climbing the Alpine cliffs. Peel, Brougham, Lyndhurst, Campbell, Bright, Gladstone, nearly all the great political and legal leaders, the prodigious workers at the bar and in the senate, have been full-chested men, who have been as sedulous to train their bodies as to train their intellects. If our American leaders accomplish less, and die earlier, it is because they neglect the care of the body, and put will-force in the place of physical strength.

It is no exaggeration to say that health is a large ingredient in what the world calls talent. A man without it may be a giant in intellect, but his deeds will be the deeds of a dwarf. On the contrary, let him have a quick circulation, a good digestion, the bulk, thews, and sinews of a man, and the alacrity, the unthinking confidence inspired by these, and, though having but a thimbleful of brains, he will either blunder upon success or set failure at defiance. It is true, especially in this country, that the number of centaurs in every community - of men in whom heroic intellects are allied with bodily constitutions as tough as those of horses-is small; that, in general, a man has reason to think himself well off in the lottery of life, if he draw the prize of a healthy stomach without a mind, or the prize of a fine intellect with a crazy stomach. But of the two, a weak mind in a herculean frame is better than a giant mind in a crazy constitution. A pound of energy with an ounce of talent will achieve greater results than a pound of talent with an ounce of energy. The first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. In any of the learned professions a vigorous constitution is equal to at least fifty per cent more brain. Wit, judgment, imagination, eloquence, all the qualities of the mind, attain thereby a force and splendor to which they could never approach without it. But intellect

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