There is a little tell-tale muscle in the inner corner of the eye, which, if you question it, will deliver a report into your looking-glass touching the state of the whole muscular system which lies elsewhere hidden in your body. When it is pale, it praises you. Muscular development is, by all means, to be kept down. Some means of holding it in check we have already dwelt upon. Muscular power, like all other power, will increase with exercise. We desire to hold the flesh in strict subjection to the spirit. Bodily exercise, therefore, must be added to the number of those forces which, by strengthening the animal, do damage to the spiritual man.

We must take great pains to choke the energy of children. Their active little limbs must be tied down by a well-woven system of politeness. They run, they jump, turn heels over head, they climb up trees, if they attempt stillness they are ever on the move, because nature demands that while the body grows, it shall be freely worked in all its parts, in order that it may develop into a frame-work vigorous and well proportioned. Nature really is more obstinate than usual on this point. So restless a delight in bodily exertion is implanted in the child, that our patience is considerably tried when we attempt to keep it still. Children, however, can be tamed and civilized. By [pg 617] sending them unhealthy from the nursery, we can deliver many of them spiritless at school, there to be properly subdued. The most unwholesome plan is to send boys to one school, girls to another; both physically and morally, this method gives good hope of sickliness. Nature, who never is on our side, will allow children of each sex to be born into one family, to play together, and be educated at one mother's knee. There ought to be—if nature had the slightest sense of decency—girls only born in one house, boys only in another. However, we can sort the children at an early age, and send them off to school—girls east, boys west.

A girl should be allowed, on no account, to climb a tree, or be unladylike. She shall regard a boy as a strange, curious monster; be forced into flirtation; and prefer the solace of a darling friend to any thing that verges on a scamper. She shall learn English grammar: that is to mean, Lindley Murray's notion of it; geography, or the names of capital towns, rivers, and mountain ranges; French enough for a lady; music, ornamental needlework, and the “use of the globes.” By-the-by, what a marvel it is that every lady has learned in her girlhood the use of the globes, and yet you never see a lady using them. All these subjects she shall study from a female point of view. Her greatest bodily fatigue shall be the learning of a polka, or the Indian sceptre exercise. Now and then, she shall have an iron down her back, and put her feet in stocks. The young lady shall return from school, able to cover ottomans with worsted birds; and to stitch a purse for the expected lover about whom she has been thinking for the last five years. She is quite aware that St. Petersburg is the capital of Ireland, and that a noun is a verb-substantive, which signifies to be, to do, to suffer.

The boy children shall be sent to school, where they may sit during three hours consecutively, and during eight or nine hours in the day, forcing their bodies to be tranquil. They shall entertain their minds by stuttering the eloquence of Cicero, which would be dull work to them in English, and is not enlivened by the Latin. They shall get much into their mouths of what they can not comprehend, and little or nothing into their hearts, out of the wide stores of information for which children really thirst. They shall be taught little or nothing of the world they live in, and shall know its Maker only as an answer to some question in a catechism. They shall talk of girls as beings of another nature; and shall come home from their school-life, pale, subdued, having unwholesome thoughts, awkward in using limbs, which they have not been suffered freely to develop; and shamefaced in the society from which, during their schoolboy life, they have been banished.

The older girl shall ape the lady, and the older boy shall ape the gentleman; so we may speak next of adults.

No lady ought to walk when she can ride. The carriages of many kinds which throng our streets, all prove us civilized; prove us, and make us weak. The lady should be tired after a four-mile walk; her walk ought to be, in the utmost possible degree, weeded of energy. It should be slow; and when her legs are moved, her arms must be restrained from that synchronous movement which perverse Nature calls upon them to perform. Ladies do well to walk out with their arms quite still, and with their hands folded before them. Thus they prevent their delicacy from being preyed upon by a too wholesome exercise, and, what is to us more pleasant, they betray their great humility. They dare only to walk among us lords of the creation with their arms folded before them, that by such humble guise they may acknowledge the inferiority of their position. An Australian native, visiting London, might almost be tempted, in sheer pride of heart, to knock some of our ladies two or three times about the head with that small instrument which he employs for such correction of his women, that so he might derive the more enjoyment from their manifest submissiveness.

The well-bred gentleman ought to be weary after six miles of walking, and haughtily stare down the man who talks about sixteen. The saddle, the gig, the carriage, or the cab, and omnibus, must protect at once his delicacy and his shoes. The student should confine himself to study, grudging time; believing nobody who tells him that the time he gives to wholesome exercise, he may receive back in the shape of increased value for his hours of thought—that even his life of study may be lengthened by it. Let the tradesman be well-rooted in his shop if he desire to flourish. Let the mechanic sit at labor on the week-days, and on Sundays let him sit at church, or else stop decently at home. Let us have no Sunday recreations. It is quite shocking to hear sanitary people lecture on this topic. Profanely they profess to wonder why the weary, toiling family of Christians should not be carried from the town, and from that hum of society which is not to them very refreshing on the day of rest. Why they should not go out and wander in the woods, and ask their hearts who taught the dragon-fly his dancing; who made the blue-bells cluster lovingly together, looking so modest; and ask from whose Opera the birds are singing their delicious music? Why should not the rugged man's face soften, and the care-worn woman's face be melted into tenderness, and man and wife and children cluster as closely as the blue-bells in the peaceful wood? What if they there become so very conscious of their mutual love, and of the love of God, as to feel glad that they are not in any other “place of worship,” where they may hear Roman Catholics denounced, or Churchmen scorned, or the Dissenters pounded? What if they then come home refreshed in mind and body, and begin the week with larger, gentler thoughts of God and man? By such means may they not easily be led, if they were at any [pg 618] unwilling, to give praise to God, and learn to join—not as a superstitious rite, but as a humble duty—in His public worship? So talk the sanitary men—here, as in all their doctrines, showing themselves little better than materialists. The negro notion of a Sabbath is, that nobody may fish: our notion is, that nobody may stay away from church.

In these remarks on exercise among adults, I have confined myself to the plain exercise of walking. It may be taken for granted that no grown-up person will be so childish as to leap, to row, to swim. A few Young Englanders may put on, now and then, their white kid gloves to patronize a cricket-match; but we can laugh at them. In a gentleman it is undignified to run; and even walking, at the best, is vulgar.

Indeed there is an obvious vulgarity in the whole doctrine which would call upon us to assist our brute development by the mere exercising of ourselves as animals. Such counsel offers to degrade us to the low position of the race-horse who is trotted to and fro, the poodle who is sent out for an airing. As spiritual people, we look down with much contempt upon the man who would in any thing compare us with the lower animals. His mind is mean, and must be quite beneath our indignation. I will say no more. Why thrash a pickpocket with thunder?