"Oh! mon Dieu, Monsieur! you are so clever that I should have thought that you must have been a piqueur or perhaps a doctor in your own country.' "Perhaps I was, Rosalie; but I think you would make the best piqueur to run in the forest with these hounds, for you have a beautiful taper leg and foot, and I should fancy from your light figure you could run very fast." "Oh! mon Dieu! non, Monsieur, je ne puis pas courir fort vite, mais je danse joliment." "You seem so fond of hounds, Rosalie, I wonder you don't marry the piqueur, and then you might spend all your days in helping him with the meûte." "Ah, oui! the piqueur is bien gentil; but he is too poor to marry ; he has only two-hundred francs a year wages, besides his keep, and that would not be enough." "Only two-hundred francs a year to look after these hounds without any other help, two horses and an old carriole, and run a hunting three days a week in the forest? Why our piqueurs are quite gentlemen, at least some of them fancy themselves so; they get about two thousand francs a year wages, and many a great deal more; and they have nothing to do but to ride, not walk, out hunting three or four days a week: the kennels are washed out for them, more frequently than not, by a valet de chiens, and the hounds' food cooked by a regular cuisinier. They just make un petit tour with the hounds in a nice green field, much greener than you have in France, two or three times a day when they don't go chassing, or take a ride to amuse themselves, under the pretence of ordering the fox-earths to be stopped, when they never forget to let Squire Blackthorn's head groom know about their coming, as there is always a horn of real good old ale in the servants' hall. The rest of their time is very frequently spent in smoking cigars, drinking beer, and playing at a game of cards called "all-fours," which is something like ecarté, which your countrymen play at so much in the cabarets here. Instead of wearing a dirty old blouse and a ragged pair of trousers, the English piqueur has a beautiful red coat and black hunting-cap, with very elegant "double-damnable" breeches and bottes à revers, or top-boots as we call them in "my country." And instead of a greasy old black rag round his throat, which looks as if the hounds would hunt it if it were dragged along the ground, the English piqueur prides himself upon invariably wearing a beautiful white cravat, folded with great care, and fastened on his breast by a brilliant; in fact, you have not an idea what smart fellows our piqueurs are." "Oh, mon Dieu!" exclaimed the girl; "I should like to go to England and marry an English piqueur, ces Anglais sont bien gentils." "And I would almost turn piqueur in earnest, Rosalie, if I might have you to help me in the kennel." "Oh, mon Dieu! Monsieur, vous plaisentez; but if you will come with me into the kitchen, I will give you some water to wash your hands, as the blood will perhaps spoil your gloves." "Thank you, Rosalie; I will just wash my hands. But what o'clock is it? past four-dear me what a time I have been bleeding these hounds! I thought it was about two." I went and washed my hands, and in a few minutes was on my way home. In the course of a few days, I paid a second visit to my patients at the kennel, where I found wonders worked even in that short time; it is extraordinary what a good effect a dose of physic produces immediately upon a hound when out of condition, to say nothing of the result of the dressing, the receipt for which I left upon the occasion of my first visit to the place; I also gave the piqueur a good lesson in blood-letting, and made him a present of a lancet, the possession of which gave him infinite delight, and I have no doubt he fancied himself all at once as great a man as Professor Youatt, or even the original Mr. Blane himself. However, I recommended him by all means to take a few preliminary lessons upon the shepherd dogs, or any other curs he could catch prowling about the house, before he attempted to regularly practise upon the more valuable circulations of his master's meûte. GYMNASTICS: THEIR EFFECT ON THE HUMAN FRAME, AND THE ADVANTAGES ENJOYED BY THEIR VOTARIES. "When wild in woods the noble savage ran," doubtless he was a fine specimen of robust and athletic humanity; but we are not to suppose that the large and wiry frame of Nature's child was inseparable from his sylvan mode of existence, or that the sons of civilization are incapable of the same physical efforts, and the same resistance to fatigue, merely because they are fortunate enough to be better fed and taken care of than their wild progenitors. It is not hardship, any more than ignorance, that makes the savage of the present day, the stalwart New Zealander, the gigantic Caffre, or the stately Delaware, a model for the anatomist and the sculptor; nor with the same amount of exercise, the same open-air life, and his own beef and pudding, would we hesitate to back a countryman from the North Riding of Yorkshire against any one of these heathen champions. Weight for weight, an English prizefighter properly trained would make, I fancy, a sad example of Red Indian, swarthy negro, or tattooed Islander; and I question if there are many Patagonians whose inches and proportions would equal those of Ben Caunt. What is it then which creates in the generality of savages so infinite a superiority over the generality of civilized men, in the three important qualities of strength, activity, and endurance? Nothing in the world but constant and long-continued exercise. Nothing but that beautiful arrangement of Nature which swells the development of the muscles, in proportion as the limbs are used; which bestows on man not only the different members necessary for the purposes of labour, but likewise gives him the power of increasing their utility in proportion to his need; so that the blacksmith, the sawyer, the oars-man, or the stone-hewer grows gradually into a Hercules from his waist upwards, whilst the pedestrian stands straight and firm upon his trim supporters, "swift as a dart, and upright as a bolt!" In these days we are too apt to cultivate the intellect alone, to the neglect of the tenement in which it is enclosed, forgetting that the "sound body" is indispensable to the utility of the "sound mind." Fatal mistake! With all our respect for genius, we cannot for a moment admit its capability of practically benefiting our present material state, when divorced from that energy which is in itself the very essence of strength. The two together are what constitute the man of action; and the man of action in all the avocations of life has ever far outstripped the man of thought. This seems to be a condition of our terrestrial being. But to return from such speculative reflections to the question of physical strength, we can scarcely turn a page of any classical author, without remarking in what esteem this bodily endowment appears to have been held by the ancients, and that not only in the earlier and ruder ages, when brute force might naturally be considered the most desirable of all qualities, but also in the more advanced and polished days of Greece and Rome, when the exercises of the gymnasium seem to have gone hand-in-hand with music, painting, poetry, and proficiency in the intellectual arts. Nor is this in any degree contrary to the natural organization of the human mind. A sense of beauty-or in other words, an appreciation of the fitness of things, is the very soul of art and from him who is made in the image of his Maker, comeliness of form in his fellow will ever call forth feelings of the highest admiration. Manly beauty must always be very near akin to manly strength; in fact, the former can hardly be said to exist in its highest form without the latter; and it was with a deep consciousness of this fact that Rome devoted her Campus Martius to the athletic exercises of her Latin chivalry, and sent forth her citizens by thousands to admire and applaud their champions' gallant feats; that Greece encouraged with shout and song the "palæstra," the wrestling-match, and the chariot-race, till a wreath, won at the Olympic games, was the highest reward human ambition could sigh to obtain, and a crown of olive raised the exhausted victor to a level with the immortal gods. It is worthy of remark that the last-named nation, in whom the ideal seems to have been more developed than in their Italian imitators, were by far the more enthusiastic of the two in their patronage of all athletic exercises. And there can be no doubt that this patronage it was which gave their sculptors such models for the chisel, as even now-fragments though they be-strike the gazer with a feeling of rapt admiration almost amounting to awe. Such is the undying power of art—such, when in perfection, the transcendent beauty of the human form! Nature has done as much for us as for the Greek. There is no reason to suppose, from any analogy which we are capable of discovering, that the size of mankind has decreased since the flood. Vice, the necessary concomitant of civilization, doubtless produces a brood of pigmies, dwarfed by her own excesses, to a degrading caricature of the Lord of Creation ; but these are not to be taken as types of the race which they dishonour; and if we could obtain a proper average of the height and size of our Anglo-Saxon stock, we may conclude from our own daily observation that such would be a fair specimen of the proportions bestowed by Providence on the animal man, when placed on earth superior and paramount to the beasts of the field. And yet from what extremes must such an average be drawn-from the fresh-coloured, muscular, and gigantic Cumbrian, the ornament of the body-guard, and the champion of the wrestling-ring, down to the swarthy and stunted mechanic of London or Manchester, raised in a hot-bed of corruption, and breathing an atmosphere of gin. The stature of the former, as we all know, it is impossible to attain; but his muscular strength and vigour of constitution are to be acquired, even as the debility and squalor of the latter are to be avoided. So broad a statement may seem at first sight incredible, but those who have practised the science of gymnastics (for science it deserves to be called), or who have witnessed the astonishing effects of its proper application, will bear me out in the truth of my assertion. In a previous number we have discussed the means by which a giant may reduce his weight to a fair burden for a good horse. Let us now consider by what method a man of ordinary size and average -nay, even feeble frame, may acquire the corporeal strength and muscular energy of a giant. Like every other rational improvement, this is only to be done by degrees the slower the progress the more perfect the completion. Our bodies are, doubtless, as capable of cultivation as our minds; but there is many a steep and toilsome gradation between the school-boy at his primer, and the "double-first or "senior wrangler," the ornament of the University to which he belongs. So there must be many an hour of close application and perseverance to place upon the weak and slender frame that superstructure of muscle and sinew which constitutes the advantage of physical strength. The very term "Gymnastics," derived as it is from a Greek word, signifying naked, or that for which men strip, conveys at once the idea of severe exertion; and it is impossible to deny that without severe exertion we can never reap the benefits derived from a judicious course of these invigorating exercises. In the term gymnastics we would, of course, include fencing, sparring, running, leaping, and all such feats of agility and address; but a proficiency in these pastimes requires, at their very commencement, a condition of high health, and an able frame. Such an enviable state, when once acquired, is easily preserved; and for him whom Nature has blessed with these advantages, gymnastics, however amusing and exhilarating, are certainly not necessary. It is to the constitution enfeebled by indulgence, or the frame weak by inheritance, that they bountifully accord all which Nature has denied; and the pupil whose earlier efforts could scarce lift his attenuated arm above his head, ere six months have elapsed finds, to his astonishment and delight, that he is capable of feats which his former ignorance would have deemed impossible to a Hercules, that his whole form and bearing are completely altered, and that health and strength, with their invariable concomitants of buoyant spirits and a cheerful temper, have made him to all intents and purposes a different man both in body and mind. Natural gymnastics, as we may call them in contradistinction to those of which we are about to speak—and which, from the manner of their application, we are justified in terming scientific gymnastics-have been in vogue with all nations from the earliest ages. In the former, we should include wrestling (a species of exercise that, more than any other, brings into play all the muscles of the human body), archery, quarter-staff, single-stick, pitching the bar, tossing the caber-a Highland variety lately much in fashion, and a number of other pastimes, in addition to those which we have already mentioned; and in Great Britain, at least, these amusements have never lacked encouragement and applause, nor the welcome patronage of Royalty itself. Bluff King Hal, with all his amiable eccentricities, was a sturdy promoter of such manly sports, whilst his cotemporary the Scottish James, of ill-fated memory-he whose death on Flodden's blood-stained field has furnished such a theme for northern chronicler and northern bard-piqued himself greatly upon 66 "His form of middle size, For feat of strength or exercise His successor, too, according to old Pitscottie, that most gossiping of historians, was content to pawn a tun of wine, and a hundred crowns" (in those days we should imagine a very sporting bet), upon the prowess of his own retinue against the English ambassador, Lord William Howard's "able men, and waled, for all kinds of games and pastimes, shooting, louping, running, wrestling, and casting of the stone”—a wager which, with their usual skill in match-making, came off in favour of our canny neighbours; the same historian remarking, with a spice of sly triumph, that "they warre (worsted) the Englishmen of the enterprize, and wan the hundred crowns and the tun of wine, which made the king very merry, that his men wan the victory." Such was the esteem in which gymnastics were held in the olden time; but it remained for modern days to apply their properties scientifically to the promotion of health; and we might almost say to the purposes of medicine. Monsieur Hamon, an ingenious Frenchman, and a retired officer of the Grand Army, was the first person who deserved the credit of introducing these pursuits as a science into this country, as he was the original inventor of what we may call anatomical gymnastics. His deep insight into the complicated machinery of the human frame, and his extraordinary research and perseverance, deserved to meet with the success which he eventually attained. In the prosecution of his studies he was accustomed to perform the most astonishing feats of strength, and the most distressing series of exertions, stripped to the skin in front of a large mirror, the reflection from which corroborated his internal feelings as to the muscular result of his labours. Many a time has he worked with the self-devotion of a martyr, till, in order to arrive at a certain and definite result, every limb quivered with intensity of distress -a struggle in which, it is only justice to observe, he never permitted his pupils to engage-until at length demonstrating theory by practice, and improving practice on theory, he was enabled to strike out a new method of education, which promised to bestow upon the weakest of men the great desiderata of activity and strength. Mons. Hamon has now |