velopment. Youth, conventionally speaking, is generous; middle age calculating and worldly. How often experience antedates the exhibition of this quality, each observer of life must determine for himself. Some whose business has been the study and delineation of human nature, affirm with confidence that selfishness shows itself equally betimes with the darker plague-spots of humanity. Lord Lytton has lately set men speculating on the age of murderers. Murderers, he says, are generally young men, and for the reason that it belongs to youth to begin the habit of miscalculating its own power in relation to the society in which you live. We learn from the newspapers that the fellows who murder their sweethearts are from two to six-and-twenty; and persons who murder from other motives than love, that is, from revenge, avarice, or ambition, are generally about twenty-eight. Twentyeight is the usual close of the active season for getting rid of one's fellowcreatures. No man, he tells us, ever commits "a first crime of a violent nature, such as murder, after thirty." It is something for the middle-aged man to feel himself out of the range of the more violent excesses; but in fact, as men mostly feel young long after they cease to be so, the immunity is not realised. We say that most men feel younger than they are, and this is perhaps because most men have not fulfilled in any degree their vague expectations for themselves, because they have as yet no sense of performance. Their shyness and reserve keep up a feeling of youth, while the faculty of effective, vehement expression, of compelling notice or a hearing, makes people feel old. We have already said that premature distinction, any circumstance disorganising life's machinery, a rush into publicity from whatever cause, separates from child

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hood, and induces a sense of youth long left behind. The author, whose first book, written in youthful enthusiasm, succeeds, but whose mind "bears but one skimming," feels old. So long as people have, or believe they have, the best part of themselves still unrevealed, some choice faculty hidden from daylight, they feel young. The poet Cowper, victim as he was of low spirits, and an inner life of brooding despondency, yet betrays no premature sense of age; if he notes his grey hairs, it is to say the difference is more outside than in. ing at the age of fifty-five, he says to Lady Hesketh, "I have, what perhaps you little suspect me of, in my nature an infinite share of ambition, but with it, I have at the same time, as you well know, an equal share of diffidence. To this combination cf opposite qualities it has been owing, that till lately I stole through life without undertaking anything, yet always wishing to distinguish myself." The works that made his fame were composed in the ten years from fifty to sixty; his industry during this period, the exceeding quiet of his life, the simplicity of his tastes, and the constancy of his affections, held him all this time aloof as it were from the course of time. It is an effort for him to realise it. "It costs me not much difficulty," he writes to the same lady, whom he had not seen for years, "to suppose that my friends, who were already old when I saw them last, are old still, but it costs me a good deal sometimes to think of those who were at that time young as being older than they were.

I know not what impression Time may have made upon your person, for while his claws (as our grannams called them) strike deep furrows in some faces, he seems to sheathe them with much tenderness, as if fearful of doing

injury, to others; but though an enemy to the person, he is a friend to the mind, and you have found him so." To Cowper, his lady friends were always young and always attractive. We do not wonder at their tender devotion to him. Again, a full fruitful mind can never feel the saddening sense of ageing and slipping out of the race, because the finer temper is never satisfied with the work done, and hopes to do better to be daily self-surpassed. So Dryden, felicitating the young poet, reserves one excellence as unattainable, short of mellow maturity: "What could advancing age have given

more?

Everybody desires to live long, but nobody wants to be old, says Swift. In one sense this is not an unreasonable wish, for age simply counted by years is a very arbitrary mode of reckoning. If it could be foreseen how long the bodily and mental constitution would maintain their vigour, then the period of age setting in might be calculated with some accuracy. As it is, many men of fifty are older than others a score years their senior. Decrepitude and deadened faculties are old age whenever they come. We of necessity use the term whether speaking of decay, or length of days; but people may be excused from appropriating the epithet old to themselves when the spring of life still lasts in them. All vigorous septuagenarians resent the civilities of forward politeness, officious in its offer of assistance. Even those reverential marks of deference which have got the Spartan youth so much credit with posterity, would cer

tainly not suit the taste of our more advanced civilisation. The astute man of the world, however many years he counts, prefers to meet men as equals while he meets them at all. It is only when a certain point is reached and retirement is courted, when age is alike felt and acknowledged a distinction by the bearer of a weight of years, and those who admire how worthily and reverently they are borne, that open demonstrations of respect are appropriate. While M. Thiers governed France, to obtrude his age upon him by any paraded act of reverence, would have been an impertinence. So long indeed as he takes an active part in public affairs it must still be such; but it was a graceful mark of respect when Lord St Leonards came into court at Kingston the other day, for all the bar to rise, and by standing show their reverence for the venerable peer, the "Nestor of the pro

fession."

No house, said Sydney Smith, is well fitted up in the country without people of all ages in it. There must be an old man or woman to pet, he says: to respect, we add; for a child's first impressions of old age, such as influence the sentiment of a life, are caught from the tone around it. John Kemble's widow used to tell how her husband on a visit at some great house had the ill luck to throw down and break some little Lady Mary's favourite doll. The child stood in speechless indignation till her anger found vent in an epithet, the most disparaging she knew, "You are an old man." a simpler household, where age was held in veneration, a child of some three or four years old was reading in Genesis to an ancient lady. "Are you as old as Methuselah?" he asked, in all innocence, looking_up into the kindly wrinkled face. The old lady, tickled by the question,

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repeated it a year after in the presence of the boy's younger brother, who seeing people laugh felt an apology incumbent upon him. "I daresay," said he, "he only said it out of compliment."

The question of age to ordinary men does not become a personal one so long as the majority of the people he meets, either in domestic life, society, or the street are his seniors. A man of sixty living exclusively with people of seventy or eighty would always feel young. We see this where an elderly daughter has the charge of parents, who engross her thoughts; until they die she scarcely realises her own standing; it adds perhaps a gloom to her life to find herself suddenly in another class-a generation older, a subject for that "powerful distemper old age," as Montaigne calls it.

It is one of the proper functions of Old Age to set off human life at its best, to reconcile men to its troublous course. If no man can be called happy till his death, they who are nearest the final goal and still cheerful and contented best deserve the epithet. Their serenity illuminates the whole backward path. The griefs, cares, and perplexities of life lose some of their bitterness when we see the bitterness outlived. There are pleasures which years cannot extinguish. As the active business of life recedes from the failing hand we see these pleasures assume a larger and more satisfying aspect. The beneficent habit of industry, the activity which leads up to and accompanies most extreme old age, finds new work for itself, and often assumes a poetical form. A man of ninety-two, whose life had been passed in an incredible round of toil of mind and body, when labour was no longer possible, made it a business to survey the stars every night. His tottering steps'

last office was duly to lead him to the open air, where he could "examine the heavens ;" his last words, "How clear the moon shines to-night." One great lesson of old age to us all is, that if we would live long and keep our powers, we must use them. All noted examples of old age are associated with exercise of some kind, either of body or of brain, and as being noted chiefly of brain. Indolence seems never to live long. To be sure, the old Cumberland beggar's exercise-he who fulfils the test of real old age, that to the current memory he always seemed old

and then

"Him from my childhood have I known, He was so old, he seems not older now," does not constitute him an example of sustained mental effort, but he "travels on," and has travelled as long as the poet can remember him; and it was this ceaseless course which kept him alive. Old Elspeth in the Antiquary' is an unprofitable instance of brain work, but what an image of ceaseless busy memory she presents, of a mind for ever in pursuit. All experience and observation present examples to the point. Looking upon the leaders in political life, it sometimes seems that mankind has gained ten years of working power since the Psalmist numbered the days of our age. And what work is harder! What taxes the powerswith stronger tension! It is not this taxing of the faculties which tries men where the power exists. it demands exercise, and frets the system if left unemployed. What does wear out the brain and shortens life is harass, which torments the mind much more through our private interests and affections than through great public responsibilities. We doubt if a distressed life is ever a very long one. Either the lot is free from such conflicts, or the

temperament is too calm and equable to be violently tossed by them. As the average age of woman exceeds that of man, our examples of clever distinguished old ladies would probably outnumber our list of lawyers and statesmen, though the eyes of all the world are not upon them in the same way. What a bevy of witty, learned, charming old ladies depart this scene together at the close of Miss Berry's Memoirs. She in her ninetieth year, her sister Agnes a year younger, Joanna Baillie eightynine, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, a contemporary of the set, all maintaining their powers to the last; their interests, letters, and conversation, constituting them cherished members of a brilliant society.

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Mary Somerville is a still later and more signal example of the lifesustaining power of brain work. An acquaintance has recorded his impressions of her on her ninetieth birthday, when he visited her at Naples in 1870: "In the spacious drawing-room of a great palazzo he found her with two ladies; herself sitting watchful and dignified in low arm-chair. Her ninety years had withered her frame and impaired her hearing, but her interest in current events was still keen. 'She had foreseen the war fifty years before at the Restoration.' She was military and commiserating, critic and woman by turns. You had but to close your eyes and to fancy a clever modern Englishwoman talking; the words and thoughts were as fresh and current as those of the clever young wife of a clever young Member of Parliament. But of course she was most interesting when she came to talk of herself.

"I do not apologise for talking of myself,' she said, for it is always good for the young to hear that old age is not so terrible as they fear. My life

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is a very placid one. I have my coffee early; from eight to twelve I write or read in bed; then I rise and paint in my studio for an hour-that is all I can manage now! The afternoon is my time of rest, then comes dinner time, and after that I sit here and am glad to see any kind friends who may like to visit me.' Then she would explain what was the reading and writing she was engaged upon. first edition of Molecular and MicroShe was correcting and adding to the scopic Science,'-' only putting it in order for my daughter to publish when a second edition is called for after my death. Oh, they are quite competent to do it,' she would say with a smile; I took care they should be much better educated than I was. And I am reading a good deal now reading

Herodotus. I took him down from my shelves the other day-it was the first time I had tried to read Greek for fifty years-to see if I had forgotten the character. To my delight I found I could read and understand him quite odotus is! All this was without the easily. What a charming writer Herslightest pedantry-the utterance of a perfectly natural, simple mind, that dwelt upon subjects which interested it when they saw that they interested its neighbour."

We have dwelt upon the bright side of the picture-not often seen, perhaps, but, where temper, intellect, and health combine, to be found within each reader's experience. Rarely among the poor does extreme old age descend with so indulgent an aspect. The very old can scarcely be other than objects of unmingled pity when the material

necessities of life need labour for their supply. The loss of authority, the dread of dependence, the spectre of the workhouse! natural cheerfulness is not strong enough to encounter these terrors, unaided by numbed faculties on the one hand, or deep religious faith on the other. Acting upon a proud nature, accustomed to domineer in the days of

its strength, and, in fact, intel·lectually superior, they sometimes produce very tragical effects. Old Old age and helplessness, in such a case, will harden into misanthropy, and deliberately die of want and starvation rather than accept prolonged life on intolerable terms. Swift says that dignity, high station, or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise apt to insult them on the score of age. Certainly independence is desirable in a very particular sense; but the happiest old age seems to be found where competence is enjoyed apart from rank and state. And what a deep pathos attends the death of the very old what a link with the past is snapped -how much knowledge is irrecoverably lost to the world!

To lament over human life as a failure, to sum up its transient pleasures, sorrows, losses, as the whole that is worth dwelling upon, is so general a tone that it seems taking a low line to give weight to compensations; but surely the blessings of Providence which spread over the whole of existence are designed to dignify every part. Youth has many friends and all the world for admirers, and responds so

well to ideal treatment that the artist may well lavish his fairest colours upon it. colours upon it. But if a man will appeal to his own experience, and ask himself from whom he has derived the greatest benefits, we believe he will find that he owes his snuggest comfort, his most genial companionship, his highest converse, his warmest sympathy, to that age which is set down as hard and worldly because it is necessarily busy with the world's material things, but which in fact is naturally more accessible than youth from the knowledge that the more passionate and exciting passages of life are over, and that a stage of life is reached in which its romance and many of its most lively interests can only be tasted through sympathies.

We let our years slip through our fingers like water. Of young and old alike this is too often true. It is no part of our aim to intrude on the preacher's office; we have confined ourselves to the social aspect of the question-age as viewed by a man's self and those about him. There are deep and solemn thoughts peculiar to every stage. Surely the way to let no period slip by us unheeded is to study the duties and privileges of each with an impartial judgment and a thankful heart.