I started with a concession.

I admitted--as every person of the smallest sense must admit--that a man will, in the great majority of cases, be all the fitter for mental exercise if he wisely combines physical exercise along with it.

The whole question between the two is a question of proportion and degree, and my complaint of the present time is that the present time doesn't see it.

Popular opinion in England seems to me to be, not only getting to consider the cultivation of the muscles as of equal importance with the cultivation of the mind, but to be actually extending--in practice, if not in theory--to the absurd and dangerous length of putting bodily training in the first place of importance, and mental training in the second.

To take a case in point: I can discover no enthusiasm in the nation any thing like so genuine and any thing like so general as the enthusiasm excited by your University boat-race.