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The time of life in which memory seems particularly to claim predominance over the other faculties of the mind, is our declining age. It has been remarked by former writers, that old men are generally narrative, and fall easily into recitals of past transactions, and accounts of persons known to them in their youth. When we approach the verge of the grave it is more eminently true,

"Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam."

"Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares
And stretch thy hopes beyond thy years."

CREECH.

We have no longer any possibility of great vicissitudes in our favour; the changes which are to happen in the world will come too late for our accommodation; and those who have no hope before them, and to whom their present state is painful and irksome, must of necessity turn their thoughts back to try what retrospect will afford. It ought, therefore, to be the care of those who wish to pass the last hours with comfort, to lay up such a treasure of pleasing ideas as shall support the expenses of that time, which is to depend wholly upon the fund already acquired.

"Petite hinc, juvenesque senesque, Finem animo certum, miserisque viatica curis.” "Seek here, ye young, the anchor of your mind; Here, suff'ring age, a bless'd provision find." ELPHINSTON.

In youth, however unhappy, we solace ourselves with the hope of better fortune, and, however vicious, appease our consciences with intentions of repentance; but the time comes at last in which life has no more to promise, in which happiness can be drawn only from recollection, and virtue will be all that we can recollect with pleasure.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 41. Another vice of age, by which the rising generation may be alienated from it, is severity and censoriousness, that gives no allowance to the failings of early life, that expects artfulness from childhood, and constancy from youth, that is peremptory in every command, and inexorable in every failure. There are many who live merely to hinder happiness, and whose descendants can only tell of long life that it produces suspicion, malignity, peevishness, and persecution; and yet even these tyrants can talk of the ingratitude of the age, curse their heirs for impatience, and wonder that young men cannot take pleasure in their fathers' company. He that would pass the latter part of life with honour and decency must, when he is consider that he shali one day be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young. In youth he must lay up knowledge for his support when his powers of acting shall forsake him; and in age forbear to animadvert with rigour on faults which experience only can correct.

young,

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 50. To secure to the old that influence which they are willing to claim, and which might so much

contribute to the improvement of the arts of life, it is absolutely necessary that they give themselves up to the duties of declining years, and contentedly resign to youth its levity, its pleasures, its frolics, and its fopperies. It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the priv ileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood. The young always form magnificent ideas of the wisdom and gravity of men, whom they consider placed at a distance from them in the ranks of existence, and naturally look on those whom they find trifling with long beards, with contempt and indignation like that which women feel at the effeminacy of men.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 50. If it has been found by the experience of mankind that not even the best seasons of life are able to supply sufficient gratifications without anticipating uncertain felicities, it cannot surely be supposed that old age, worn with labours, harassed with anxieties, and tortured with diseases, should have any gladness of its own, or feel any satisfaction from the contemplation of the present. All the comfort that can now be expected must be recalled from the past, or borrowed from the future; the past is very soon exhausted, all the events or actions of which the memory can afford pleasure are quickly recollected; and the future lies beyond the grave, where it can be reached only by virtue and devotion.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 69. An old Greek epigrammatist, intending to show the miseries that attend the last stage of man, imprecates upon those who are so foolish as to wish for long life, the calamity of continuing to grow old from century to century. He thought that no adventitious or foreign pain was requisite, that decrepitude itself was an epitome of whatever is dreadful, and nothing could be added to the curse of age, but that it should be extended beyond its natural limits.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 69. Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish and precipices of horror.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 69. That natural jealousy which makes every man unwilling to allow much excellence in another, always produces a disposition to believe that the mind grows old with the body, and that he whom we are now forced to confess superior is hastening daily to a level with ourselves. By delighting to think this of the living, we learn to think it of the dead. And Fenton, with all his kindness to Waller, has the luck to mark the exact time when his genius passed the zenith, which he places at his fifty-fifth year. This is to allot the mind but a small portion.

Intellectual decay is doubtless not uncommon; but it seems not to be universal. Newton was in his eighty-fifth year improving his chronology, a few days before his death; and Waller appears not, in my opinion, to have lost at eighty-two any part of his poetical power.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Life of Waller. To novelty, to acuteness of sensation, to hope, to ardour of pursuit, succeeds what is, in no inconsiderable degree, an equivalent for them all, "perception of ease." Herein is the exact difference between the young and the old. The young are not happy but when enjoying pleasure; the old are happy when free from pain. And this constitution suits with the degrees of animal power which they respectively possess. The vigour of youth has to be stimulated to action by impatience of rest; whilst to the imbecility of age, quietness and repose become positive gratifications. In one important step the advantage is with the old. A state of ease is, generally speaking, more attainable than a state of pleasure. A constitution, therefore, which can enjoy ease is preferable to that which can taste only pleasure. This same perception of ease oftentimes renders old age a condition of great comfort, especially when riding at its anchor after a busy or tempestuous life.

PALEY: Natural Theology.

Most men in years, as they are generally discouragers of youth, are like old trees, which, being past bearing themselves, will suffer no young plants to flourish beneath them.

POPE.

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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings. POPE:

Thoughts on Various Subjects.

A truly Christian man can look down like an eternal sun upon the autumn of his existence: the more sand has passed through the hour-glass of life, the more clearly can he see through the empty glass. Earth, too, is to him a beloved spot, a beautiful meadow, the scene of his childhood's sports, and he hangs upon this mother of our first life with the love with which a bride, full of childhood's recollections, clings to a beloved mother's breast, the evening before the day on which she resigns herself to the bridegroom's heart. RICHTER.

were a sign-post to the grave! But, in reality, a cheerful, vigorous old man discloses to us the immortality of his being: too tough to be mown down even by death's keen scythe, and pointing to us the way into the second world. RICHTER.

The world is very bad as it is,-so bad that good men scarce know how to spend fifty or threescore years in it; but consider how bad it would probably be were the life of man extended to six, seven, or eight hundred years. If so near a prospect of the other world as forty or fifty years cannot restrain men from the greatest villanies, what would they do if they could as reasonably suppose death to be three or four hundred years off? If men make such improvements in wickedness in twenty or thirty years, what would they do in hundreds? And what a blessed place then would this world be to live in!

W. SHERLOCK.

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It is not in the heyday of health and enjoyment, it is not in the morning sunshine of his vernal day, that man can be expected feelingly Oh, this contentment shown by a man al- to remember his latter end, and to fix his heart though the sunset clouds of life were gathering upon eternity. But in after-life many causes around him, inspires new life into the hypochon-operate to wean us from the world: grief softens driacal spectator or listener, whose melancholy minor chords usually, in the presence of an old man, begin to vibrate tremendously, as if he

the heart; sickness searches it; the blossoms of hope are shed; death cuts down the flowers of the affections; the disappointed man turns his

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It would be a good appendix to "The Art of Living and Dying," if any one would write "The Art of Growing Old," and teach men to resign their pretensions to the pleasures and gallantries of youth, in proportion to the alteration they find in themselves by the approach of age and infirmities. The infirmities of this stage of life would be much fewer, if we did not affect those which attend the more vigorous and active part of our days; but instead of studying to be wiser, or being contented with our present follies, the ambition of many of us is also to be the same sort of fools we formerly have been. I have often argued, as I am a professed lover of women, that our sex grows old with a much worse grace than the other does; and have ever been of opinion that there are more well-pleased old women than old men. I thought it a good reason for this, that the ambition of the fair sex being confined to advantageous marriages, or shining in the eyes of men, their parts were over sooner, and consequently the errors in the performance of them.

SIR R. STEELE: Tatler, No. 266.

As to all the rational and worthy pleasures of our being, the conscience of a good fame, the contemplation of another life, the respect and commerce of honest men, our capacities for such enjoyments are enlarged by years. While health endures, the latter part of life, in the eye of reason, is certainly the more eligible. The memory of a well-spent youth gives a peaceable, unmixed, and elegant pleasure to the mind; and to such who are so unfortunate as not to be able to look back on youth with satisfaction they may give themselves no little consolation that they are under no temptation to repeat the follies, and that they at present despise them.

SIR R. STEELE: Spectator, No. 153. The nearer I find myself verging to that period of life which is to be labour and sorrow, the more I prop myself upon those few supports that are left. SWIFT.

The troubles of age were intended. . . to wean us gradually from our fondness of life the nearer we approach to the end. SWIFT.

Old women, and men too, . . . seek, as it were, by Medea's charms, to recoct their corps, as she son's, from feeble deformities to sprightly handsomeness.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

What great thing soever a man proposed to do in his life, he should think of achieving it by fifty. SIR W. TEMPLE.

None that feels sensibly the decays of age, and his life wearing off, can figure to himself those imaginary charms in riches and praise, that men are apt to do in the warmth of their blood. SIR W. TEMPLE.

Socrates used to say that it was pleasant to grow old with good health and a good friend; and he might have reason: a man may be content to live while he is no trouble to himself or his friends; but after that, it is hard if he be not content to die. I knew and esteemed a person abroad who used to say, a man must be a mean wretch who desired to live after threescore years old. But so much, I doubt, is certain, that in life, as in wine, he that will drink it good must not draw it to the dregs. Where this happens, one comfort of age may be, that whereas younger men are usually in pain whenever they are not in pleasure, old men find a sort of pleasure when they are out of pain; and as young men often lose or impair their present enjoyments by craving after what is to come, by vain hopes, or fruitless fears, so old men relieve the wants of their age by pleasing reflections upon what is past. Therefore, men in the health and vigour of their age should endeavour to fill their lives with reading, with travel, with the best conversation and the worthiest actions, either in public or private stations; that they may have something agreeable left to feed on when they are old, by pleasing remembrances.

SIR W. TEMPLE.

There is a strange difference in the ages at which different persons acquire such maturity as they are capable of, and at which some of those who have greatly distinguished themselves have done, and been, something remarkable. Some of them have left the world at an earlier age than that at which others have begun their career of eminence. It was remarked to the late Dr. Arnold by a friend, as a matter of curiosity, that several men who have filled a considerable page in history have lived but fortyseven years (Philip of Macedon, Joseph Addison, Sir William Jones, Nelson, Pitt), and he was told in a jocular way to beware of the forty-seventh year. He was at that time in robust health; but he died at forty-seven! Alexander died at thirty-two; Sir Stamford Raffles at forty-five. Sir Isaac Newton did indeed live to a great age; but it is said that all his discoveries were made before he was forty; so that he might have died at that age and been as celebrated as he is. On the other hand, Herschel is said to have taken to astronomy at forty-seven. Swedenborg, if he had died at sixty, would have been remembered by those that did remember him merely as a sensible worthy man, and a very considerable mathematician. The strange fancies which took possession of him, and which survive in the sect he founded, all came on after that age.

Some persons resemble certain trees, such as the nut, which flowers in February, and ripens its fruit in September; or the juniper and the arbutus, which take a whole year or more to

perfect their fruit; and others the cherry, which takes between two and three months. WHATELY:

Annot. on Bacon's Essay, Of Youth and Age. As for the decay of mental faculties which often takes place in old age, every one is aware of it; but many overlook one kind of it which is far from uncommon; namely, when a man of superior intelligence, without falling into anything like dotage, sinks into an ordinary man. Whenever there is a mixture of genius with imbecility, every one perceives that a decay has taken place. But when a person of great intellectual eminence becomes (as is sometimes the case) an ordinary average man, just such as many have been all their life, no one is likely to suspect that the faculties have been impaired by age, except those who have seen much of him in his brighter days.

Even so, no one on looking at an ordinary dwelling-house in good repair would suspect that it had been once a splendid palace; but when we view a stately old castle or cathedral partly in ruins, we see at once that it cannot be what it originally was.

The decay which is most usually noticed in old people, both by others and by themselves, is a decay in memory. But this is perhaps partly from its being a defect easily to be detected and distinctly proved. When a decay of judgment takes place-which is perhaps oftener the case than is commonly supposed-the party himself is not likely to be conscious of it; and his friends are more likely to overlook it, and, even when they do perceive it, to be backward in giving him warning, for fear of being met with such a rebuff as Gil Blas received in return for his candour from the Archbishop, his patron.

WHATELY:

Annot. on Bacon's Essay, Of Youth and Age.

Of persons who have led a temperate life,

those will have the best chance of longevity who

want of the consolations of religion: but when fortune frowns, or friends forsake us; when sorrow, or sickness, or old age comes upon us, then it is that the superiority of the pleasures of religion is established over those of dissipation and vanity, which are ever apt to fly from us when we are most in want of their aid. There

is scarcely a more melancholy sight than an old man who is a stranger to those only true sources of satisfaction. How affecting, and at the same time how disgusting, is it to see such a one

awkwardly catching at the pleasures of his younger years, which are now beyond his reach, or feebly attempting to retain them, while they mock his endeavours and elude his grasp!

WILBERFORCE: Practical View.

ALCHEMY.

The world hath been much abused by the opinion of making gold; the work itself I judge to be possible; but the means hitherto propounded are (in the practice) full of error.

LORD BACON: Nat. Hist., No. 126. The alchemists call in many varieties out of astrology, auricular traditions, and feigned testimonies. LORD BACON.

I was ever of opinion that the philosopher's stone, and an holy war, were but the rendezvous of cracked brains, that wore their feather in their heads. LORD BACON: Holy War.

ALLEGORIES.

The characteristic peculiarity of the Pilgrim's Progress is that it is the only work of its kind which possesses a strong human interest. Other allegories only amuse the fancy. The allegory of Bunyan has been read by many thousands with tears. There are some good allegories in Johnson's works, and some of still higher merit by Addison. In these performances there is, perhaps, as much wit and ingenuity as in the Pilgrim's Progress. But the pleasure which is produced by the Vision of Mirza, the Vision of between Rest and Labour, is exactly similar to Theodore, the genealogy of Wit, or the contest odes or from a canto of Hudibras. It is a the pleasure we derive from one of Cowley's pleasure which belongs wholly to the under

have done hardly anything else but live;-what may be called the neuter verbs-not active or passive, but only being: who have had little to do, little to suffer, but have led a life of quiet retirement, without exertion of body or mind avoiding all troublesome enterprise, and seeking only a comfortable obscurity. Such men, if of a pretty strong constitution, and if they escape any remarkable calamities, are likely to live long. But much affliction, or much exertion, and, still more, both combined, will be sure to tell upon the constitution-if not at once, yet at least as years advance. One who is of the char-standing, and in which the feelings have no part acter of an active or passive verb, or, still more, both combined, though he may be said to have lived long in everything but years, will rarely

reach the age of the neuters.

WHATELY:

Annot. on Bacon's Essay, Of Regimen of Health. When the pulse beats high, and we are flushed with youth, and health, and vigour; when all goes on prosperously, and success seems almost to anticipate our wishes, then we feel not the

whatever. Nay, even Spenser himself, though
lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make
assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever
allegory interesting. It was in vain that he

lavished the riches of his mind on the House
of Pride and the House of Temperance. One
unpardonable fault, the fault
of tediousness,
pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen. We
become sick of cardinal virtues and deadly
sins, and long for the society of plain men and
Women. Of the persons who read the first

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It is proper that alms should come out of a little purse, as well as out of a great sack; but surely where there is plenty, charity is a duty, not a courtesy: it is a tribute imposed by Heaven upon us, and he is not a good subject who refuses to pay it. FELLTHAM.

Are we not to pity and supply the poor, though they have no relation to us? No relation? That cannot be. The gospel styles them all our brethren: nay, they have a nearer relation to us-our fellow-members; and both these from their relation to our Saviour himself, who calls them his brethren. SPRAT.

It is indeed the greatest insolence imaginable, in a creature who would feel the extremes of

thirst and hunger if he did not prevent his appetites before they call upon him, to be so forgetful of the common necessities of human nature as never to cast an eye upon the poor and needy. The fellow who escaped from a ship which struck upon a rock in the west, and joined with the country people to destroy his brother sailors and make her a wreck, was thought a most execrable creature; but does not every man who enjoys the possession of what he naturally wants, and is unmindful of the unsupplied distress of other men, betray the same temper of mind?

SIR R. STEELE: Spectator, No. 294. The poor beggar hath a just demand of an alms from the rich man, who is guilty of fraud, injustice, and oppression if he does not afford relief according to his abilities. SWIFT.

ALPHABET.

'Tis a mathematical demonstration, that these twenty-four letters admit of so many changes in their order, and make such a long roll of difalike, that they could not all be exhausted ferently-ranged alphabets, not two of which are though a million millions of writers should each write above a thousand alphabets a day for the space of a million millions of years. BENTLEY.

On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, the invention of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. He seems to have thought that the use of letters had operated on the human mind as the use of the go-cart in learning to walk, or of corks in learning to swim, is said to operate on the human body. It was a support which, in his opinion, soon became indispensable to those who used it, which made vigorous exertion first unneces intellect would, he conceived, have been more sary, and then impossible. The powers of the fully developed without this delusive aid. Men derstanding and the memory, and, by deep and would have been compelled to exercise the unassiduous meditation, to make truth thoroughly their own. Now, on the contrary, much knowledge is traced on paper, but little is engraved in the soul. A man is certain that he can find information at a moment's notice when he wants it. He therefore suffers it to fade from his mind. Such a man cannot in strictness be said to know anything. He has the show without the reality of wisdom. These opinions Plato has put into the mouth of an ancient king of Egypt. [Plato's Phædrus.] But it is evident from the context that they were his own; and so they were understood to be by Quinctilian. [Quinctilian, xi.] Indeed, they are in perfect accordance with the whole Platonic system.

LORD MACAULAY: Lord Bacon, July, 1837.

AMBITION.

The soul, considered abstractedly from its passions, is of a remiss and sedentary nature, slow in its resolves, and languishing in its executions. The use therefore of the passions is the understanding, to enforce the will, and to to stir it up and to put it upon action, to awaken make the whole man more vigorous and attentive in the prosecution of his designs. As this is the end of the passions in general, so it is particularly of ambition, which pushes the soul to such actions as are apt to procure honour and But if we carry our reputation to the actor. reflections higher, we may discover farther ends of Providence in implanting this passion in mankind.

It was necessary for the world that arts should be invented and improved, books written and transmitted to posterity, nations conquered and civilized. Now, since the proper and genuine motives to these, and the like great actions,

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