a woman of keen intellectual culture and catholic sympathieswhether she knew Mr. Blackmore. She said 'No,' and launched immediately into the praise of his books. When I told her he had lived for nearly thirty years only a few miles away from her own home, she was startled, and begged me to bring him to see her. But Mr. Blackmore, though pleased at the proposal, was even then somewhat shaky on his legs, and so the project was abandoned. George Macdonald once said to me, 'I always wanted to know that man,' and I know of a certainty that Blackmore also wanted to know him; but, alas, they never met, and for a similar His appreciation of Mr. Hardy, especially in the personal sense, was marked, and I know that it was a matter of regret that Dorchester was so far from Teddington. Blackmore was by no means easy of access, a circumstance that was due in part to his own proud shyness. Few great writers were more kind, however, to younger men, especially novelists, and I could give instances of this, but to do so would be to violate the confidences of intimate unguarded talk.

reason.

I have a big bundle of Mr. Blackmore's letters written during the last eight years. They are brief notes for the most part, indited in that violet ink of which he was so fond. Thereby hangs a tale. I once was staying in a sleepy little town, remote from London. Blackmore knew it well, in fact he had sent me thither. Years before, he had purchased at a funny little shop in that quaint seaside town his first bottle of this magic ink. He begged me to get him some more from the same place, as he had hunted up and down London in vain for it. I did so, and to the amusement of us both it proved to be manufactured in Kentish Town. He laid in a stock with much of the gusto which other men show in laying in some choice brand of champagne; and when I last asked him if the ink had not run dry, he said, 'No, and it promises to outlast my pen.' The novel of his own which he most liked was not 'Lorna Doone,' but 'The Maid of Sker,' and after that 'Springhaven' and 'Alice Lorraine.' He used to smile with a touch of quiet disdain at the oracular young gentlemen in the press, who went into ecstasies over 'Lorna Doone,' and proceeded to run down everything else he wrote, or at best to damn his subsequent achievements with faint praise. He was perfectly aware that he had made a reputation that would last, and in his own quiet modest way he possessed his soul in patience. Once when there was talk of a lavishly illustrated edition of one

of his stories, he said to me, 'I am not very anxious to be illustrated; for I never yet saw any illustrations of my own work that did not kindle my wrath. They were better than my work, I dare say; but then they were not a bit like it, conveying in no way what I meant either in character or scenery.' He used to denounce what he called the stupid system, which prevents 'author and artist from putting their heads together' in the interests of common interpretation. I was surprised when he added, 'I have never yet set eyes'-this was in 1894-' on one of the many gentlemen who have done me the honour of putting their ideas as mine.'

Many of his laconic notes give a picture with almost a stroke of the pen. Writing in an evil month of May, seven years ago, when the east winds blew persistently, he says: We can get no rain. All crops must fail with another month of this fearful drought. Already the pears fall like hailstones.' Then Then a few weeks later: 'Goodness knows I have not much to grin at in these evil days, when we cannot even get a drop of dew, and strawberries are down to twopence halfpenny a pound.' Then in another mood and under other conditions of sky and soil: What a lovely change! All the bulbs look up again, and soon the hepaticas will bead the earth.' Once again, and this time in a rough winter: 'For nearly a month I have been undergoing bronchial troubles, which make me a plague to everybody, self included. Scarcely can I see to write in this bottle-green darkness-London XXX bottled in a chimney-pot.' But for the most part the letters touch too closely his affairs or mine, or else refer to the matter of the moment, to justify escape into print. Almost the last time I saw him he was telling me, in his own direct picturesque way, that to him now wearisome days and nights were appointed. He said that he often sat half the night with a book over the fire in despair of sleep. I asked him what kind of book had power of solace, and I was not surprised to find that the old fastidious scholar was living in fancy in the world's youth, as became a man who in boyhood had seen the glory of life in the enchanted pages of Homer. To the last he knew the secret of eternal youth, and was never a pessimist, either in regard to himself or the world. His closing letters to me cannot be quoted, though they dwell with manly fortitude on the great change which he knew as inevitable. The last of them—it was written this year, indeed only a few weeks ago-was of the nature of a solemn tender farewell.

STUART J. REID.

ATHLETICS AND HEALTH.

[Much astonishment has been caused by the rejection of several prominent Volunteer athletes on the score of constitutional unfitness. Inquiries of the medical authorities have elicited the fact that most of the rejections were prompted by minor and unessential deficiencies. Here an attempt has been made to discuss the wider question of the general effect of different branches of athletics on the health of the body.]

THAT the English are an athletic race may be granted. The contrary has no doubt been very ably maintained, but rather as a thesis than a serious truth. Of course of the 70,000 odd people who go to view the final of a professional cup tie, a majority perhaps can take only a 'paper' interest in the game, and twenty-two athletes are a small proportion out of, say, 30,000 academic spectators. We are not gladiatorial because we love to watch the doings of gladiators. Just as the Germans say of us that we are music-lovers but not music-makers, so in athletics our great interest may entail no corresponding capacity. Still, intense interest goes for something. The crowds do not only assemble to see a foreign fight and to lay wagers on the result, but partly at least because they individually have run or kicked or bicycled themselves into a share of the athletic spirit.

When we turn from the lower and middle to the upper classes, the athleticism of the race is not open even to academic denial. An American writer, who not long since published 'A Sporting Pilgrimage through England,' was struck by nothing more than the universality of athletics at the University. It seemed to him that every man he met did something athletic for his college. He was not deceived. To look, for instance, at a small college like Corpus Christi, Oxford. It consists of about fifty members, but supports a football fifteen and a football eleven, a cricket eleven, and an eight and a torpid, perhaps two. The sum of these teams amounts to fifty-five. Of course very many members have double functions; but if you add to these games the 'fancy pastimes,' such as lawn tennis and hockey, and a detached game like athletics proper, the number of unathletic men will scarcely reach double figures. In one way the college we have instanced is not an example particularly favourable to our immediate point, as it is essentially a reading college, an institution where every

one must perforce read for an honour school. It will, however, on that account the better serve to illustrate a later step of the argument.

We are then athletic. From school till the end of the University career athletics fill half our time and more than half our thoughts. The Master of Pembroke, in a late speech, lamented that the undergraduate very much disliked being bumped, but was quite happy at being ploughed. It is certain that every college in its corporate capacity does very much dislike being bumped; it has a very strong athletic interest, but it remains to be proved whether this enthusiasm for sports acts for good or ill on the mind, morals, and health of the community. The influence of athletics is immense. In many cases mere games provide the chief factor to that which guides brain, character, and body to its ultimate development, and therefore it is categorically imperative to answer the question: Do we think, act, and move better or worse for our fights on path and field and river?

If we 'take the high priori road,' it is possible to go on talking for any length of time without making much advance. There is a sort of orthodox, stereotyped, sermonised form of argument from the trammels of which athletic writers and speakers generally fail to escape. From the very accent of the exordium a dread foreboding falls on the listener that the playing fields of Eton' and 'mens sana in corpore sano' will once again be doing duty before the speech is many minutes older. Now the playing fields of Eton (though a trifle dark for out-fielding) are an excellent institution, and no one objects to a healthy mind in a healthy body. But poetic sayings and Latin citations do not help us to know whether the sound body really is acquired on the said arena. There are people of by no means grandmotherly upbringing or unmasculine instincts who regard the progress of athleticism with dread, and, using Greece as their historical parallel, consider the exaggerated reverence for games as one of the many signs of a growing decadence. On both sides the. arguments have been as a rule too much 'in the air;' the subject is in need of scientific investigation; it requires an accurate knowledge of physiological truths, an insight into the springs of moral action, and an accumulated body of statistical facts gathered from practical athletes.

Some attempt is here made to descend from the air, but the

subject is such a wide one, that in the present article there will be only room for the discussion of one branch. The writer has by him some statistics showing the proficiency of athletes in the schools, from which may be extracted the influence of athletics in the intellectual sphere, and also a list of the after careers of University athletes, which will give some line as to the moral effect of athletics, but these mental and moral considerations must be here omitted to give room for the inquiry into the relation of athletics and bodily health.

There occur from time to time, as there must occur, premature deaths in the ranks of prominent athletes. Sometimes the suddenness of the death, or the sadness of contrast between the strength and the ease of its overthrow, finds a universal pity, which with sentimental suddenness presumes that athletics are the cause of the loss and therefore meet to be abolished. It was public opinion so expressed that as long ago as 1869 prompted Dr. Morgan of Manchester to collect a famous list of statistics of University oarsmen. His skill and perseverance in collecting and tabulating information were extraordinary, and his published book made an immense sensation, especially in America, where some attempts-never, however, successfully carried out-were made to imitate Dr. Morgan's system among 'prize-fighters and other branches of athletics!' Statistics, of course, like all isolated groups of facts, may tell gross lies. Unrelated details, when taken from their isolation to illustrate any definite subject, are necessarily vitiated by the mere change of position. For instance, teetotalers may live less long than wine-bibbers, but apply this fact to the solution of the question of the relative wholesomeness of water and wine, and a host of incidental accompaniments will soon deprive your statistical facts of half their value. Dr. Morgan's results are liable to the same sort of vitiation, but they are very suggestive and very exhaustive. Their results are here summarised partly because they have fallen into oblivion, but chiefly in order to see how far his tables of facts fit in with facts of physiology more recently ascertained.

Out of 255 University eightsmen who were alive in 1869 Dr. Morgan heard from 251, and of those that died before that date he collected full accounts from their friends. The result of the inquiries 'panned out' in this way. Out of a total of 294, only seventeen said that the exercise had done them harm. And even of these seventeen the bulk had rowed the race at a time when