502 Letters from the United States of North America. [May, 



were engaged in the fight of Lexington (fight, I say, for it was nothing 

 of a battle ; though we do hear so much of it in the new story, by Cooper, 

 the " Walter Scott of America" as they have it here), that he hardly 

 ever speaks of a man but by the title of Doctor, or Captain, or Deacon, or 

 Reverend Mister, or something else — faith ! one would be ready to be- 

 lieve that he had a job in view from the posterity of these warlike no- 

 bodies, or that he had a widow or two of each to soothe ; and so too, in 

 the oration of a Mister Sprague — I beg pardon — by Charles Sprague, Esq. 

 (a merchant's clerk, and a very good maker of poetry*) ; a speech made 

 up in part of generous and bold, pure poetry, and in part of what I take 

 to be the bad passages of some rejected newspaper article, about, nobody 

 knows what, and I dare say nobody cares : well, in that speech the orator 

 has occasion to say (it would bother a stranger to guess why — I guess), 

 that a particular somebody is the son of somebody else — which said some- 

 body else, being the Ma_j/or of Boston, where the title of mayor was new, 

 is accounted for in a grave note, to a fourth of July oration I Did you 

 ever hear a better joke ? If you did not, I'll give you one. They 

 hardly ever speak of George Washington here, but as General Wash- 

 ington — as if that were a title to distinguish that man by. 



Stop ! — I must pursue a different method, or I shall forget more than 

 half I was going to say. I alluded, a page or two ago, to the efforts 

 which are now making here, in every quarter, on a prodigious scale, for 

 the improvement of the people. They are wide awake now from Georgia 

 to Maine — state striving with state ; and the whole, as it should be, 

 striving with the federal government, for the bettering of education. 

 There is to be — and will be, before many years, I dare say — a national 

 University at Washington, very much like your London University ; and 

 you are aware that already every state, or every large one, has a college 

 or two of its own, a host of academies, and schools without number. This 

 looks well : but this is not half. They are now attending here to phy- 

 sical education. They perceive that most of their superior young men, 

 tliose at any rate who cut a figure at college, are quite sure to be good 

 for nothing after they have done with college. And why ? Because 

 their health is no more. They perceive that — God forgive them and 

 our fathers for not perceiving it before, — that intellectual education is 

 not a third part of true education ; that true education should be moral, 

 physical, and intellectual ; that, hitherto, every thing has been sacrificed 

 to brief intellectual improvement ; and that, to say all in a word, so inti- 

 mate is the sympathy between the mind and the body, that neither can 

 be well if the other be unwell. Having perceived these truths, they are 

 introducing gymnastics into the schools of the country ; have already 

 one professor in the neighbourhood of New York, and are now preparing 

 to order a supply — I hope for every state, and for every school in the 

 country ; and I have no doubt, for old Harvard, where hundreds and 

 hundreds of youth have studied themselves to death — laid a sure foun- 

 dation, that is, for perpetual incapacity in the great business of life, by 

 their neglect of proper corporeal exercise. 



Yet more — a journal of education is to be established; a journal 



*I remember two words— two little words, to be found in a late poem of his — 

 which of themselves are enough to prove him a poet (whether he stole them or not— 

 and 1 believe he did not) — 



" Young love with eye of tender gloom,"— lie says. 



