‘You would hint politely that you are as open as me to all noble, and chivalrous, and truly manly emotions?’
‘What think you?’
‘That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend. But do not forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession—in one word, Heaven’s mercy—which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you will find the mass of our class founder. Woe to the class or the nation which has no manly physical training! Look at the manners, the morals, the faces of the young men of the shopkeeping classes, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; [235] of fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without tumbling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them. To that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among the middle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, and the sailor are comparatively free.’
‘And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high sense of honour, which seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a large proportion of a certain more venerable profession?’
‘Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. But we are getting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that of whatever profession he may be—to travestie Shakspeare’s words,—
“The man that hath not sporting in his soul,
Is fit for treason’s direst stratagems”—
and so forth.’
‘Civil to me!’
‘Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of other Englishmen who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steering for Exmoor to-day. If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some original means for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture, science, or travels, discovery, and commerce. But if he be not, as there are a thousand chances to one he will not be, then whatever you teach him, let the two first things be, as they were with the old Persians, “To speak the truth, and to draw the bow.”’
By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the last night’s showers. A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies,—sight delicious to the angler.