ATHLETIC SPOETS.

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A very few of the natives, certainly, fish; and in the winteran equally small number have just sufficient life left inthem to try a day's shooting. At some of the schools,too, gymnastic games have been introduced, but at thesethe lolloping, loutish young Deutschers, are not half sonimble as the bear-cubs in climbing the poles at the Zoolo-gical Gardens. Indeed, the sole amusement of the Germanboys seems to consist in calling after the English ladsin jackets, — "Engländer Stumpf-schwänz" (i.e. EnglishCrop-tail), and in striking the little girls they rriay meetin the streets; for your young German is a perfect specimenof the genus coward — lads of 18 and 20 howling like infants

throughout the kingdom,— a plan which has since been taken advantage of byevery civilised State in Europe.

This of course led to tbe general improvement of English stage-coaches, sothat, up to the year 1830, the style and speed of our public conveyances,especially those on the Brighton Road, were admitted by all foreigners to bethe perfection of taste and convenience.

All these things, therefore, naturally fitted the public mind for the receptionof an entirely new and still more rapid mode of locornotion, viz. the railway :an invention which is so thoroughly English that, even supposing it likely tohave occurred to any slow Prussian brainlet, it would still have been impossibleto have found any other nation (excepting perhaps America) with spirit orcapital sufficient to have afforded the plan a trial.

Still, the rapidity of the railway served to infiame rather than satisfy theEnglish mind. Dear postage was as serious an obstacle to rapid communicationas even slow-coaches, (a phrase, by the by, that has grown into a term of oppro-brium with us); consequently, the next step was to reduce the tariff on all homeletters to a penny ; and thus, commercially and intellectually speaking, to bringour Land's End within the same distance of the capital as even the metro-politan suburbs ; to place Liverpool in the same close proximity with Lon-don as Hammersmith itself, giving it, like the cockney neighbour, its two orthree deliveries of London letters per diem. Again, England had to thank noforeign mind for all this ; but, on the contrary, France, and other enlightenedcountries, seeing the social good of drawing the half-civilised people who exist atthe remote part of every nation into closer communion with the more refined andenterprising spirits of the capital, availed themselves of the measure, immediatelywe had proved it to be practicable.

Further, even cheap postage, with its three deliveries daily in towns that oneetook a fortnight to reach, was insufficient to satisfy the impatience and activity