6 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
the brilliant roll of the “ young men of 1830,” 
in Paris, — Balzac, Soulié, De Musset, De Ber- 
nard, Sue, and their compeers, — nearly every 
one perished in the prime of life. What is the 
explanation? A stern one: opium, tobacco, 
wine, and licentiousness. ‘All died of soften- 
ing of the brain or spinal marrow, or swelling of 
the heart.”” No doubt many of the noble and 
the pure were dying prematurely at the same 
time; but it proceeded from the same essential 
cause: physical laws disobeyed and bodies ex-. 
hausted. The evil is that what in the debauchee 
is condemned as suicide, is lauded in the devo- 
tee as saintship. The delirium tremens of the 
drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson 
than the second childishness of the pure and 
abstemious Southey. 
But, happily, times change, and saints with 
them. Our moral conceptions are expanding 
to take in that “athletic virtue” of the Greeks, 
dpery yupvaorixy, which Dr. Arnold, by precept 
and practice, defended. It is good news, for 
certainly this is as it should be. One of the 
most potent causes of the ill-concealed aliena- 
tion between the clergy and the people, in our 
community, has been the supposed deficiency, 
on the part of the former, of a vigorous, manly 
life. There is a certain moral and physical 
anhemia, a bloodlessness, which separates most 
