calls for honest rest. It is the nervous exhaustion of a sedentary,
frivolous, or joyless life which madly tries to restore itself by the
other nervous exhaustion of debauchery. It is an old prescription,--

"Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit,
_Abstinuit venere et vino_."

There is another class of critics whose cant is simply can't, and who,
being unable or unwilling to surrender themselves to these simple
sources of enjoyment, are grandiloquent upon the dignity of manhood,
and the absurdity of full-grown men in playing monkey-tricks with their
bodies. Full-grown men? There is not a person in the world who can
afford to be a "full-grown man" through all the twenty-four hours. There
is not one who does not need, more than he needs his dinner, to have
habitually one hour in the day when he throws himself with boyish
eagerness into interests as simple as those of boys. No church or state,
no science or art, can feed us all the time; some morsels there must be
of simpler diet, some moments of unadulterated play. But dignity? Alas
for that poor soul whose dignity must be "preserved,"--preserved in
the right culinary sense, as fruits which are growing dubious in their
natural state are sealed up in jars to make their acidity presentable!
"There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned," and degradation in
the dignity that has to be preserved. Simplicity is the only dignity. If
one has not the genuine article, no affluence of starch, no snow-drift
of white-linen decency, will furnish any substitute. If one has it, he
will retain it, whether he stand on his head or his heels. Nothing
is really undignified but affectation or conceit; and for the total
extinction and annihilation of every vestige of these, there are few
things so effectual as athletic exercises.