It is really doubtful if dumb-bells, a gymnasium, and a pickerel-back racing-wherry would meet precisely the case of Mr. Herbert, however desirable for city saints who have plenty of spare sixpences for the omnibuses.

But the miserable sinner,—­“where,” as the shepherd exclaimed, to Mr. Weller’s indignation, “is the miserable sinner?” Keeping school, keeping books, making books, standing behind counters when busy and on street-corners when disengaged, doing anything or everything but taking care of his precious body, and thereby giving his precious soul the chance of being in very bad company, and following the fate of poor Tray, and of the well-meaning stork in Dr. Aesop’s fable.  What shall he, or rather, what can he, do with his leisure?  For leisure more or less almost every young man has,—­and it is of young men, and especially of the very young men, that we are benevolently writing.  If he dwell in an inland town, the boat-club is hopeless,—­and boat-clubs, though capital things for the young gentlemen of Harvard and Yale and Trinity, have also their drawbacks.  One cannot always be ready to move in complete unison with a dozen fellow-mortals.  Pendennis is never ready when the club are desirous to row; Newcome is perpetually anxious to tempt the wave when the wave tempts nobody else.  The gymnasium gets to be a wearisome round of very mill-horse-like work, after the varieties of possible dislocation of all one’s bones have been exhausted.  Climbing ropes and poles with nothing but cobwebs at the top, and leaping horses with only tan at the bottom, grow monotonous after six months’ steady dissipation thereat.  Base-ball clubs do not always find desirable commons, and the municipal fathers of the towns have a prejudice against them in the streets.  What shall youth, conscious of muscle and eager for fresh air, do?  Even the gloves are not fancy-free, but are very apt to bring with them the slang of the ring and the beastly associations of professional pugilism.  Youth looks up to its teachers; but if its teachers in the manly art be the Game-Chicken, the Pet, the Slasher, youth, in learning to respect the brute strength of such men, will hardly learn to respect itself.

But—­and here lies the purport of this article—­there is hardly a town or village of New England which has not within a quarter of a mile of its suburbs a patch of woodland or a strip of sandy beach.  What is to hinder the sinner, if he repent him of the foul air and cramped posture of which he has been the victim, from a little pedestrianism?  Do American men and boys ever walk?  Drive, it is known they do; they can always get time for that.  But to walk, certainly to scramble and to climb, must be added by Mr. Phillips, in the new editions of his exquisite and inexhaustible Lecture, to the catalogue of the “Lost Arts.”