“‘It is not only that,’ replied the excellent man: ‘but nothing moralises men like cricket.’ “‘How?’ said I, rather astonished to hear him take such high ground. “‘Look here,’ he replied; ‘a good cricketer is bound to be sober and not frequent the public-house, to accustom himself to obey, to exercise restraint upon himself; besides, he is obliged to have a great deal of patience, a great deal of activity; and to receive those blows of the ball without shrinking, requires, I assure you, some degree of courage.’” We suspect that these remarks belong of right at least as much to the French philosopher as to the English national schoolmaster; but they bring forward in an amusing way the tendency of one-ideaed philanthropists, which the author elsewhere notices, to attribute to their own favourite hobby the only possible moral regeneration of society: “Every Englishman who is enthusiastic in any particular cause never fails to see in that the greatness and the glory of his country; and in this he is quite serious. In this way I have heard the game of cricket held up to admiration as one of the noblest institutions of England, an institution which insures to the country not only an athletic, but an orderly and moral population. I have seen the time when the same honour was ascribed to horse-racing; but since this sport has crossed the Channel, and it has been found by experience that it does not always preserve a country from revolutions and _coups d’état_, it has lost something of its prestige in England.” There is always some moral panacea in the course of advertisement, like a quack medicine, to cure all diseases: mechanics’ institutes, cheap literature, itinerant lecturers, monster music-classes, have all had their turn; and just at present the ‘Saturday Review’ seems to consider that the salvation of England depends upon the revival of prize-fighting.