As a fair offset to these remarks, I shall give a brief extract from a letter to Mr. Acton from a Cambridge graduate, whose experience will be found not so very different from that of intellectual and sedentary men this side the water. “Looking from the academic side of the question, the celibacy of Fellows would seem very desirable (for thus only can they retain their fellowships and the annual stipend pertaining), but no one can deny that such a principle involves the sacrifice of individual comfort. Is this fair to the celibate? I think not. It has always seemed to me that a single man is in an unnatural position; a being created by the Almighty to increase and multiply a race made from the beginning male and female, will, of course, have his natural instincts in accordance with this design; and mortify or control them as he may, they are still there, and cannot become extinct. The sufferings of an abstinent life I believe to be _cruel_ to every man between five and twenty and five and forty; and though athletic exercises, regular diet, and so forth, supply some slight relief, still it is never permanent; and in any event of reaction, the sufferer will find himself the worse for his previous regularity. Of course a sedentary life aggravates the symptoms, and I cannot believe that any man of ordinary vigor, so living and so abstaining, will be free from nocturnal annoyance. Still, this would be among the least of his distresses; nay, in nine cases out of ten, I presume the safety valve of nature is a most happy and beneficial relief; and though I cannot fly in the face of medical authority, and deny that there is a pernicious class of the disorder, still I firmly believe all those cases immensely exaggerated by the sufferers, and capable of an easy cure, to wit, matrimony, unless the patient, by degrading practices, has reduced himself to a state of impotence. Meanwhile a man should go into training for a conflict with his appetites just as keenly as he does for the University Eight, the only difference being that the training will be more beneficial and more protracted. Besides diet and exercise, let him be constantly employed; in fact, let him have so many metaphorical irons in the fire that he will find it difficult to snatch ten minutes for private meditation; let his sleep be very limited, and the temperature he moves in as nearly cold as he can bear; let neither his eye nor his ear be voluntarily open to anything that could possibly excite the passions; if he see or hear accidentally what might have this tendency, let him at once resort to his dumb-bells, or any other muscular precaution, till he is quite fatigued; whenever any sensual image occurs involuntarily to his mind, let him fly to the same resource, or else to the intellectual company of friends, till he feels secure of no return on the enemy’s part. Lastly, I would fain add, let the sufferer from sexual causes make his affliction the subject of most earnest prayer,