Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

have become impossible for the greater number: and athletic exercises are now, in England at least, becoming more and more artificialized and expensive; and are confined more and more— with the honourable exception of the football games in Battersea Park— to our Public Schools and the two elder Universities. All honour, meanwhile, to the Volunteer movement, and its moral as well as its physical effects. But it is only a comparatively few of the very sturdiest who are likely to become effective Volunteers, and so really gain the benefits of learning to be soldiers. And yet the young man who has had no substitute for such occupations will cut but a sorry figure in Australia, Canada, or India; and if he stays at home, will spend many a pound in doctors’ bills, which could have been better employed elsewhere. “Taking a walk”— as one would take a pill or a draught— seems likely soon to become the only form of outdoor existence possible for too many inhabitants of the British Isles. But a walk without an object, unless in the most lovely and novel of scenery, is a poor exercise; and as a recreation, utterly nil. I never knew two young lads go out for a “constitutional,” who did not, if they were commonplace youths, gossip the whole way about things better left unspoken; or, if they were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating on politics or metaphysics from the moment they left the door, and return with their wits even more heated and tired than they were when they set out. I cannot help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a certain celebrated passage; and that it was not “sitting on a hill apart,” but tramping four miles out and four miles in along a turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits discoursed