have to bide their time and to live upon hope. Horace Walpole commends to his friend the good sense of his niece Charlotte on occasion of her receiving proposals from Lord Dysart, whom she did not know by sight, and who wanted to marry her within a week. She

said to her sister Waldegrave "very sensibly," "If I was but nineteen I would refuse him point blank. I do not like to be married in a week to a man I never saw. But I am two-and-twenty; some people say I am handsome, some say I am not; I believe the truth is I am likely to be large and to go off soon-it is dangerous to refuse so great a match." "She came and saw this imperious lover, and I believe was glad she had not refused him point blank, for they were married last Thursday-that is, in a week." It is not nature here that makes youth short-lived; a girl unhackneyed is still a girl at twenty-two, fresh, full of hope and expectation, with her life before her, no airs of stale worldly wisdom tainting the sense of spring and hope. It is not nature that hurries life out of its spring; it is the work of men and women, a plot against reason which possesses a frivolous society from first to last, making youth everything till all the rest of life is mourned over as a falling-off, a weary task, the day after the fair. Youth catches the tone, shortening its own span, chattering about broken illusions, and asking

"Ah, what shall I be at fifty,

Should nature keep me alive,
If I find the world so bitter,
When I am but twenty-five?"

Horace Walpole in his own person is a representative example of this tone, as his early life is an example of the brilliant spring which belongs to youth among the highborn who are fitted by manner,

wit, and wealth to illustrate and enjoy it. Age is his bête noire; he cannot forget it; whether he jests or is serious we see it a prevailing dread. He adores the young, they constitute the charm of society, yet he hopes for no tenderness or sympathy from them, and is afraid of their contempt. He worships the memory of his own youth, its sparkling wit and social successes; he recognises no gains from thought and experience, no compensations, and describes life about him or before him as only a repetition of old joys from which the spirit has fled, but which he yet prefers to all maturity of thought or graver interests can offer. In society of ladies, addressing them in graceful persiflage, the thought is still uppermost. To Lady Hervey he describes the old life as the only one in which he can hope to be acceptable, and yet which he feels slipping out of, with a banter which is only yearning in disguise. 'My resolutions for growing old and staid are admirable. I wake with a sober plan and intend to pass the day with my friends, then comes the Duke of Richmond and hurries me down to Whitehall to dinner; then the Duchess of Grafton sends for me to loo in Upper Grosvenor Street; before I can get thither I am begged to step to Kensington to give Mrs Anne Pitt my opinion about a bow window; after that I am to walk with Miss Pelham in the terrace till two in the morning, because it is moonlight and her chair is not come. All this does not help my morning laziness, and by the time I have breakfasted, fed my birds and my squirrels, and dressed, there is an auction ready; in short, Madam, this was my life last week, and is, I think, every week, with the addition of forty episodes; so pray forgive me; I really will begin to be between forty and fifty by the time

I am fourscore." The age between forty and fifty is a capital working age, but when more than half these years have been spent in precisely the same round, the pleasure may well be dashed with forebodings, for it is a late age to take to being serious. What his real feelings are we learn from a letter to his friend George Montagu written two days later. "The less one is disposed, if one has any sense, to talk of one's self to people that inquire only out of compliment, the more satisfaction one feels in indulging a self-complacency, by sighing to those that really sympathise with our griefs. Do not think it is pain that makes me give this low-spirited air to my letter. No, it is the prospect of what is to come, and the sensation of what is passing that affects me. The loss of youth is melancholy enough, but to enter into old age through the gate of infirmity, most disheartening." He suffered, it will be remembered, from gout. "I have not the conscience to trouble young people when I can no longer be juvenile as they are, and I am tired of the world, its politics, its pursuits, and its pleasures, but it will cost me some struggles before I submit to be tender and careful. Christ! Can I ever stoop to the regimen of old age? I do not wish to dress up a withered person, nor drag it about to public places, but to sit in one's room clothed warmly, expecting visits from folks I don't wish to see, and tendered and flattered by relations impatient for one's death. Let the gout do its worst. . . . Nobody can have truly enjoyed the advantages of youth, health, and spirits, who is content to exist without the two last, which alone bear any resemblance to the first." It is the success, prominence, and brilliancy of his youth that is answerable for this tone. The busy worker has a succession of springs.

Walpole can only look back. "Unlike most people that are growing old, I am convinced that nothing is charming but what appeared important to one's youth, which afterwards passes for follies. Oh! but those follies were sincere; if the pursuits of age are so they are sincere alone to self-interest. This I think, and have no other care than not to think aloud. I would not have respectable youth think me an old fool." And the gloom increases as years advance. At sixty-six he describes himself as a ruin. "Dulness in the form of indolence grows upon me. I am inactive, lifeless, so indifferent to most things that I neither inquire after nor remember any topics that might enliven my letters. It would be folly in me to concern myself about new generations. How little a way can I see of their progress.' And yet he lived fourteen years after this, feeling older and older, though in the full possession of his faculties and even of his style. Can any one suppose that under different circumstances, under the stimulus of wholesome, because necessary occupation,-no careless, insolent triumph of youth to look back to, no peerage revealing how long that youth was past, no consciousness of being an object of curiosity or observation when no longer worth looking at,-Horace Walpole would not have been a younger man at forty-seven and sixty-seven respectively, than these revelations show him?

Youth, which is graceful in its golden prime, too often develops or collapses into awkward unsightly proportions. Sensitiveness as well as vanity suffers under the contrast. Who would not rather be one of the crowd of lookers-on than the observed of all observers on the occasion of the visit to Stowe he celebrates, where he was invited to meet the Princess Amelia,

and an al fresco entertainment was arranged in the stately gardens and lamp-lit grotto? "The evening being, as will happen, more than cool, and the destined spot anything but dry, as our procession descended the vast flight of steps into the garden, in which was assembled a crowd of people from Buckingham and the neighbouring villages, to see the princess and the show, the moon shining very bright, I could not help laughing as I surveyed our troop, which, instead of tripping lightly to such an Arcadian entertainment, were hobbling down by the balustrades, wrapped up in cloaks and greatcoats for fear of catching cold. The earl, you know, is bent double, the countess very lame; I am a miserable walker, and the princess, though as strong as the Brunswick lion, makes no figure in going down fifty stone stairs. Except Lady Anne, and by courtesy Lady Mary, we were none of us young enough for a pastoral. These jaunts are too juvenile.

I am

ashamed to look back and remember in what year of Methuselah I was here first." It is a very formidable penalty of rank and great ness never to be allowed to sink into personal insignificance. Quite apart from vanity must come the longing, when crowds come to see, to be something worth seeing. It is enough to account for the misanthropy of some royal fops and belles, when self-flattery can longer give the lie to the mirror's home truths.

no

"Shall I believe him ashamed to be seen? For only once, in the village street Last year, I caught a glimpse of his face, A grey old wolf, and a lean."

Industry, in whatever rank, keeps off the sense and dread of age. It is perhaps some decay of brain power in the indolent or idle which suggests it. The great leaders of

parties know better than to put such ideas into other people's heads; but also they have no leisure for speculation upon the mere progress of time. They accept work as the proper necessity of middle life, and the period of middle life lasts long where the faculties are all kept employed, and are found equal to the demands on them. The busy man, whether statesman or shopkeeper, has his mind, thoughts, plans all fixed on the future. He looks forward, which is the habit of youth, and thus keeps up the sensation when the fact is long past. But where the prizes of life come with youth without pains or care, comparatively few recognise the charm of work. It looks like duty only, if indeed it is that, to people who have already what most men work for. It is only the middle and lower classes who are driven to it on pain of want or loss of selfrespect; and perhaps it is in the middle class especially that it acts as an elixir. The poor age and fade under their toil, and can't help feeling, and saying that they do, when strength and agility fail them, and back and limbs ache under burdens that once were easy. Vigour of mind outlives vigour of limb. The lawyer and keen man of business are not reminded from within by the loss of power that the descent of the hill has begun, till long after the cottager and his wife look and call themselves old man and woman. Of course there are dangers in this unconsciousness. Men should always bear in mind that they are mortal, but the fret and moan of dissatisfaction, the murmur that youth is gone, leaving nothing else worth living for, is no better preparation for death than the loins girded and the lamps burning; than strenuous activity, even in temporal duties. If the poet, conscious that his leaf is sere, as he bids "fall,

rosy garland, from my head," can look forward

"Yet will I temperately rejoice;"

so may the middle life of the great middle class, so long as the world keeps it busy.

It is not the poetical view of youth that we are combating, but the cynical view of all the rest of life, which with so many is either an affectation or a needless gloom. Experience rarely fits in with the ideal-we scarcely think it does with the following tender monody which we find in Dr Newman's sermon entitled the Second Spring; but unquestionably youth under its more charming aspect is the most lovely spectacle granted to mortal eyes, and as such should be pictured

and sung.

"How beautiful is the human heart when it puts forth its first leaves, and opens and rejoices in its spring-tide. Fair as may be the bodily form, fairer far, in its green foliage and bright blossoms, is natural virtue. It blooms in the young, like some rich flower, so delicate, so fragrant, and so dazzling, generosity, lightness of heart and amiableness, the confiding spirit, the gentle temper, the elastic cheerfulness, the open hand, the pure affection, the noble aspiration, the heroic resolve, the romantic pursuit, the love in which self has no part-are not these beautiful? and are they not dressed up and set forth for admiration in their best shapes, in tales and in poems? and ah! what a prospect of good is there! Who could believe that it is to fade! and yet as night follows upon day, as decrepitude follows upon health, so surely are failure, and overthrow, and annihilation, the issue of this natural virtue, if time only be allowed to it to run its course. There are those who are cut off in the first opening of this excellence, and then if we may trust their epitaphs, they have lived like angels; but wait awhile, let them live on, let the course of life proceed, let the bright soul go through the fire and water of the world's temptations, and

seductions, and corruptions, and transformations, and alas for the insufficiency of nature! alas for its powerlessness to persevere, its waywardness in disappointing its own promise! Wait till youth has become age, and not more different is the miniature we have of him when a boy, when every feature spoke of hope, put side by side with when he is old, when his limbs are the large portrait painted to his honour shrunk, his eye dim, his brow furrowed, and his hair grey, than differs the moral grace of that boyhood from the forbidding and repulsive aspect of his soul, now that he has lived to the age thropy, and selfishness, is the ordinary of man. For moroseness, and misanwinter of that spring."

is tested, surely all these excellenExposed to the test by which age cies of youth which issue in so transient but illusory:- seeming dreary a winter will prove not only and no more. Youth is the cunningest of all disguises, looking back, we see the faults of the man to have been there all the while; the noble aspiration and generosity, judged by this key, vain self-confidence; the elastic cheerfulness, mere animal spirits; just as the misanthropy of later years resolves itself into bile. Man is so complex a being-presents so many sides and aspects, that a hundred dissimilar portraits may all be living likenesses. If our memory responds to this picture with some gracious answering image, it cannot deny or refuse its tribute in illustration of a directly opposite one. There is no selfishness so blind, remorseless, and merely animal as youthful selfishness in some terrible instances. The preaching of consequences does sometimes tell upon such natures; they are more tolerable at fifty. Some touch of sympathy awakes in them. Experience humanises them. "Wisdom and experience," says Swift, "which are divine qualities, are the properties of age, and youth in the want of them is contemptible.