Recreation is as necessary as work. What kind is to be sought after, and
what avoided? For health's sake, if for nothing else, boys should have
some kind of out-door amusements. A boy has an easy choice of good and
healthy recreation, and therefore has no excuse for taking up with bad
objects. Cricket, Rowing, Volunteering, and such-like, are healthy, and
easily obtainable recreations. Gambling, drinking, loitering, are not to
be thought of for a moment, they are the curse of the lazy and
weak-minded. Theatres are very good if you keep out of the cheap and
nasty ones. Music halls are much better avoided. I do not say that it
is necessarily wrong to go there, or that you are certain to come to harm
if you frequent them, but there is more chance of temptation, and an
inferior entertainment for your money. Well acted plays may open out
your mind, but the silliness of the music hall entertainment will only
react upon you. You can tell a music hall frequenter, not by the words
of his mouth so much as by the shuffle of his feet: his highest ambition
seems to be to dance the double shuffle, and perhaps sing a few verses of
some jingling rhyme. Out-door recreation is not so easily attainable, in
the winter, as the time at your disposal is so short. In-door amusements
must, to a great extent, take their place. The gymnasium is a good
institution; chess is a game worth learning, and very fascinating to some
minds; cards are good as long as gambling is avoided, and many other
games readily suggest themselves to one's mind.
Reading will be more to the liking of many. Read books which are worth
reading, not the penny trash which shops offer to the boys of England. I
should hope that the boys of England have sufficient brains to care for
something a little above the penny dreadfuls, otherwise it is a bad look
out for the future men of England. Independently of libraries you can
now get books, by good writers, as cheap as sixpence--Walter Scott,
Fennimore Cooper, Maryatt, Dickens, &c. A word about books. Of course,
in books by writers such as I have mentioned you will find many things
spoken of which are wrong and ought not to be. They must write so if
stories are to be written of life as we find it, and mere goody-goody
books, which avoid all mention of such things, are unnatural, and do not
give true pictures of life. The harm of too many cheap publications, and
not only the cheap ones, is, that in speaking of these things they make
them appear unavoidable, and even worthy of praise. Good writers show
how revolting crime and evil is, how they can be overcome and resisted,
and how truth and honesty must prevail in the end. The difference
between good books and plays and bad ones is not so much the subjects
they write about as the way in which they speak of them. Some of the
cheap literature is only foolish, some is distinctly wicked, but both are
better avoided, and your time and money spent on worthier objects. Avoid
bad company, and take care that your recreations are manly and honest.