INTRODUCTION. 31 
when every thing,—education, business, politics, all that 
concerns or interests mankind, is forced ahead without 
stay or stop, whether for consideration or repentance, as if 
by steam and electricity. 
And if it be admitted, as I think it will not be denied, 
that never was it more needful for the advantage, moral 
and physical, of all classes, that some comprehensive plan 
of rational diversion and relaxation from incessant labor 
and anxiety should be devised and recommended—it will 
scarcely, I think, be questioned or disputed, that never 
was there more need that some measure of manliness 
should be infused into the amusements of the youth of the 
so-styled upper classes—the jeunesse doree—of the At- 
lantic cities, some touch of manhood inoculated into the 
ingenuous youths themselves. 
It is worthy of remark that whatever faults, whatever 
weaknesses, follies, deficiencies or vices, may be justly laid 
to the charge of the English gentry and nobility, want of 
manliness, of pluck to do or to endure, is not of them. 
Of European armies alone the English is officered, 
from its subalterns to its commanders-in-chief, by the 
gentry. In France, the nobility have long ceased to be 
the nobility of the sword; the splendid hosts of the 
French are officered entirely by the guste milieu. While 
all other aristocracies are wholly effete, effeminate, evi- 
rated, field sports have preserved the English gentle- 
man strong, at least, of body, capable to walk, to ride, 
to endure cold, heat, hunger, weariness, wounds as well— 
he could not do it better—as the meanest of his fellow- 
countrymen or fellow-soldiers. 
