ere are not any influences powerful enough to keep the
elder safe from intellectual rust.

If you, who are a distinguished sportsman and athlete, would kindly
inform us with perfect frankness of the line which your studies have
followed since you quitted Eton, we should be the wiser for your
experience. Have gymnastic exercises hardened you, as Plato said they
did, when pursued excessively? and do you need the musical studies which
he both valued and dreaded as the most powerful of softening influences?
If you have energy enough to lead both lives, pray how do you find the
time?

As to Plato's musical influence, you invite it, and yet you
treacherously elude its power. After being out all day in the pursuit of
sylvan pleasures (if shooting on treeless wastes can be called a sylvan
pleasure), you come home at nightfall ravenous. Then you do ample
justice to your dinner, and having satisfied your _faim de chasseur_,
you go into the drawing-room, and ask your wife to play and sing to you.
If Plato could witness that pretty scene, he would approve your
obedience to his counsels. He would behold an athletic Englishman
stretching his mighty limbs on a couch of soft repose, and letting his
soul grow tender as his ears drank ravishing harmonies. If, however, the
ancient sage, delighted with so sweet a picture of strength refined by
song, were to dwell upon the sight as I have done, he would perceive too
soon that, although your body was present indeed, your soul had become
deaf in sleep's oblivion. So it happens to you night after night, and
the music reaches you no more than the songs of choristers reach the
dead in the graves below.

And the elevating influences of literature? You have books, of course,
in abundance. There is a library, amongst other luxuries of your home.
But the literature your intellect feeds upon is in the columns of the
_Field_, your newspaper. Yet this neglect of the means of culture is not
due to any natural feebleness of the mind. Your brain, by its nature, is
as vigorous as your vigorous body. It is sleep, and weariness, and the
great necessary business of digestion, that drown your intellectual
energies. The work of repairing so great a destruction of muscle is
nature's chief concern. Since you became the mighty hunter that you are,
the wear and tear have been enormous, and the necessary rapidity of
reconstruction has absorbed your rich vitality.

I will not question the wisdom of your choice, i