whose whole existence is absorbed in any one thing, be it playing or praying.  Queen Elizabeth, after admiring a gentleman’s dancing, refused to look at the dancing-master, who did it better.  “Nay,” quoth her bluff Majesty,—­“’tis his business,—­I’ll none of him.”  Professionals grow tiresome.  Books are good,—­so is a boat; but a librarian and a ferryman, though useful to take you where you wish to go, are not necessarily enlivening as companions.  The annals of “Boxiana” and “Pedestriana” and “The Cricket-Field” are as pathetic records of monomania as the bibliographical works of Mr. Thomas Dibdin.  Margaret Fuller said truly, that we all delight in gossip, and differ only in the department of gossip we individually prefer; but a monotony of gossip soon grows 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.”