With this denial of the body on one side, with this tremendous stimulus of brain on the other, and with a delicate and nervous national organization to begin with, the result is inevitable.  Boys hold out better than girls, partly because they are not so docile in school, partly because they are allowed to be more active out of it, and so have more recuperative power.  But who has not seen some delicate girl, after five consecutive hours spent over French and Latin and Algebra, come home to swallow an indigestible dinner, and straightway settle down again to spend literally every waking hour out of the twenty-four in study, save those scanty meal-times,—­protracting the labor, it may be, far into the night, till the weary eyes close unwillingly over the slate or the lexicon,—­then to bed, to be vexed by troubled dreams, instead of being wrapt in the sunny slumber of childhood,—­waking unrefreshed, to be reproached by parents and friends with the nervous irritability which this detestable routine has created?

For I aver that parents are more exacting than even teachers.  It is outrageous to heap it all upon the pedagogues, as if they were the only apostolical successors of him whom Charles Lamb lauded “the much calumniated good King Herod.”  Indeed, teachers have no objection to educating the bodies of their small subjects, if they can only be as well paid for it as for educating their intellects.  But, until recently, they have never been allowed to put the bodies into the bill.  And as charity begins at home, even in a physiological sense,—­and as their own children’s bodies required bread and butter,—­they naturally postponed all regard for the physical education of their pupils until the thing acquired a marketable value.  Now that the change is taking place, every schoolmaster in the land gladly adapts himself to it, and hastens to insert in his advertisement, “Especial attention given to physical education.”  But what good does this do, so long as parents are not willing that time enough should be deducted from the ordinary tasks to make the athletic apparatus available,—­so long as it is regarded as a merit in pupils to take time from their plays and give it to extra studies,—­so long as we exult over an inactive and studious child, as Dr. Beattie did over his, that “exploits of strength, dexterity, and speed” “to him no vanity or joy could bring,” and then almost die of despair, like Dr. Beattie, because such a child dies before us?  With girls it is far worse.  “Girls, during childhood, are liable to no diseases distinct from those of boys,” says Salzmann, “except the disease of education.”  What mother in decent society, I ask you, who is not delighted to have her little girl devote even Wednesday and Saturday afternoons to additional tasks in drawing or music, rather than run the risk of having her make a noise somewhere, or possibly even soil her dress?  Papa himself will far more readily appropriate ten dollars to this additional confinement than five to the gymnasium or the riding-school.  And so, beset with snares on every hand, the poor little well-educated thing can only pray the prayer recorded of a despairing child, brought up in the best society,—­that she might “die and go to heaven and play with the Irish children on Saturday afternoons.”