The closing of his school for girls, in 1868, may be said to mark the end of Dio Lewis’s greatest activity in the interest of physical training. He had never relinquished altogether the lecture field, and now found more leisure for the work, speaking in Massachusetts and New Hampshire on his favorite topics, physical education and temperance. The winter of 1873-1874 was given up to an extensive course of lyceum lectures in the West, under the auspices of a lecture bureau, and again, as in the fifties, he devoted Sundays to the cause of Temperance, “always keeping in mind what he had for twenty years desired to see inaugurated, a practical movement on the part of women to close the saloons.” The balance of the year 1874 was filled with temperance work exclusively, and out of the “Women’s Crusades” which he inspired and helped to organize at this time was developed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, formed at Cleveland in November. In 1875 he was obliged to heed the signs of approaching physical collapse, and went to California for three years of outdoor life.[235] The year 1884 saw him located on a farm at Smithtown, Long Island, in search of rest and trying meanwhile to “concentrate his attention on chickens,” but in July able to deliver a course of lectures and teach gymnastics at the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute. His death occurred at Yonkers, May 21, 1886.[236] Mr. James C. Boykin pays the following just tribute to Dio Lewis: “It may be true that ‘he was unconventional, sympathetic, plausible, oracular, and self-sufficient,’ and ‘not a scientist in any proper sense,’ as one writer has said.[237] But, notwithstanding all this, he rendered a real service. Even if he had nothing in his favor but the undoubted fact that he gave gymnastics in America a greater impulse than any man before him had done, that would be sufficient to earn for him the gratitude of all interested in physical training. But he did more. He first awakened the American public to the appreciation of the fact that the mere development of huge muscles is not the true idea of physical training. His contribution to the list of exercises and to gymnastic material was by no means insignificant, though, to be sure, his claims were out of all proportion to their value; but, more than all else, he lifted the gymnasium above the low plane it had occupied in the public mind as the resort of prize-fighters and bullies, and carried gymnastics into the schoolroom to an extent never before approached in this country, and into the home to an extent that no one else had ever attempted.”[238] His so-called ‘system’ was not of a sort to survive for many years the loss of the founder’s energetic leadership, and yet he prepared the soil for the broader and more substantial type of work of a later day. BIBLIOGRAPHY.