done most for
the education of Boston,--Dixwell and Sherwin, or Sheridan and Braman?

Should it prove, however, that the cultivation of active exercises
diminishes the proportion of time given by children to study, we can
only view it as an added advantage. Every year confirms us in the
conviction, that our schools, public and private, systematically
overtask the brains of the rising generation. We all complain that Young
America grows to mental maturity too soon, and yet we all contribute
our share to continue the evil. It is but a few weeks since we saw the
warmest praises, in the New York newspapers, of a girl's school, in that
city, where the appointed hours of study amounted to nine and a quarter
daily, and the hours of exercise to a bare unit. Almost all the
Students' Manuals assume that American students need stimulus instead
of restraint, and urge them to multiply the hours of study and diminish
those of out-door amusements and of sleep, as if the great danger did
not lie that way already. When will parents and teachers learn to regard
mental precocity as a disaster to be shunned, instead of a glory to
be coveted? We could count up a dozen young men who have graduated at
Harvard College, during the last twenty years, with high honors, before
the age of eighteen; and we suppose that nearly every one of them has
lived to regret it. "Nature," says Tissot, in his Essay on the Health of
Men of Letters, "is unable successfully to carry on two rapid processes
at the same time. We attempt a prodigy, and the result is a fool." There
was a child in Languedoc who at six years was of the size of a large
man; of course, his mind was a vacuum. On the other hand, Jean Philippe
Baratier was a learned man in his eighth year, and died of apparent old
age at twenty. Both were monstrosities, and a healthy childhood would be
equidistant from either.

One invaluable merit of out-door sports is to be found in this, that
they afford the best cement for childish friendship. Their associations
outlive all others. There is many a man, now perchance hard and worldly,
whom we love to pass in the street simply because in meeting him we
meet spring flowers and autumn chestnuts, skates and cricket-balls,
cherry-birds and pickerel. There is an indescribable fascination in
the gradual transference of these childish companionships into maturer
relations. We love to encounter in the contests of manhood those whom we
first met at football, and to