Provokes the ghastly monarch's sudden stride, Caraffa, again, in Landor's tragedy, is told that his days are numbered, and answers, "All men's are." Fra Rupert replies, "But some are not notcht off like schoolboy's days anxious to see his parent." Shakspeare's Gremio asks, "And may not young men die, as well as old?" but it does not go far to dispose of Tranio's objection concerning him, "That's but a cavil; he is old, I young." The comparative position of youth might be expressed in Hotspur's statement as to supply: "Looks he not for it?" the old man, for death. "So do we," says Vernon, as the young may say. But "His is certain, ours is doubtful." Hotspur rejoins, We that are young may die soon, and may live to be old. He, the greybeard, has lived to be old, and so has lived his life, and now lives under sufferance, with peremptory and prompt notice to quit. But the pithiest summary of the question is perhaps that in the four lines uttered, two apiece, by prince and abbot in The Golden Legend: "Prince Henry. We must all die, and not the old alone; Abbot. The young have no exemption from that doom. According to the accepted chronology, it would seem that Isaac himself lived some forty years after the time that he said he was old, and therefore knew not the time of his death, when it might overtake him on the morrow, or not for a few years yet. But he would be wise in time, and leave nothing unprepared. For he felt that he was failing, breaking; he felt the chill of age overshadowing him, and he knew from what quarter that cold wind blows; he knew that old age is next neighbour to death. Men vary, according to constitution or temperament and character, in their computations of the OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. * 29 commencing epoch of old age. Burns, who died in his thirty-eighth year, is known to have felt the approach of age before he had reached the noon of life, and by a kind of presentiment of his own premature decline, he had noted. down forty-five as the evening of life's closing day: "When ance that five-and-forty's speel'd, Wi' wrinkled face, Comes hostin', hirplin', owre the field, When Whitefield returned from America to England for the last time, Wesley is said to have been struck with the change. in his appearance: "he seemed," says he in his journal, "to be an old man though he has hardly seen fifty years; and yet it pleases God that I, who am now in my sixty-third year, find no disorder, no weakness, no decay, no difference from what I was at five-and-twenty,-only that I have fewer teeth and more grey hairs." Perthes writes :"Certainly the age beyond fifty brings with it peculiar dangers but I am still of opinion that a sterling man is not complete till old age. In my own case, I cannot complain of too much age, but rather of too much youth"; and he * Asked what he calls the periods of decay, Cagliostro answers,-The natural periods: in a state of nature, man's strength increases until thirty-five years of age; it then remains stationary until forty; and from that time forward it begins to diminish, but almost imperceptibly till fifty; then the process becomes quicker and quicker to the day of his death. But, "in our state of civilization, when the body is weakened by excess, cares, and maladies, the decadence begins at thirty-five.' "After fifty," says Burke, "man becomes every year more sensible to the period of debility and decreptitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. "Non sum qualis eram," writes Swift from Dublin to Pope, in 1723. “I left you in a period of life when one year does more execution than three at yours." Six years added to forty-five "is not a trifle," protests Turner the painter, in one of his bargaining letters, respecting engagements in hand and the time they would take. "This baiting, my good friend," writes Carrick to Colman, in his worry and weariness, "is no joke after forty." Sir William Farquhar emphatically assured the first Lord Malmesbury that Pitt died "of old age" at forty-six, as much as if he had been ninety. declared that in presence of so many old young people, he often feared there was in him something of the wandering Jew. The author of an essay on Growing Old, specifies twenty-eight, thirty-five, and forty-eight as marked years, on reaching which one still feels young; and adds, “many men honestly think that sixty-five or sixty-eight is the prime of life." In another of his essays, having to deal with the welcome we are apt to accord to the month of October, when its early days are fine, pleasing ourselves with the belief that October is one of the finest months in the year, and that we have many warm, bright, still days before us, the same writer observes, that in all this we, of course, are conscious of practising upon ourselves a cheerful, transparent delusion; even as the man of forty-eight often declares that about forty-eight or fifty is the prime of life. M. Charles de Bernard is at once eloquent and malicieux on the subject of the culminating point of life,—when first some light symptoms of decline play off a sort of prelude to that concert of gloomy avertissements, and sombre foreshadowings, that each succeeding year makes more sonorous, more menacing, more to be dreaded, and the last movement of which leads straight to the tomb. Wrinkles begin to furrow the brow, which expands as the locks become thinner all around; and, according to difference of temperament, the figure either insensibly s'évide comme celle des médailles consulaires, or waxes gross and double-chinned and rotund exceedingly. When a man has once put his foot on this terrain incliné, certain involuntary signs afford proof of his having all at once discovered a new horizon. For awhile, he every morning "passe en revue la douzaine de fils d'argent qui ornent chacune de ses tempes, en poussant, s'il croit s'apercevoir que le chiffre augmente, une interjection que je n'écrirai pas.” He seems, like il penseroso, in one of Barry Cornwall's dramatic fragments, to confront Old Age, and look upon him, in himself, face to face; forecasting and foretasting that later stage when his lean limbs go tottering, and his tongue stammers forth sadness; when from his eyes the light of love and intellect is quenched and gone,— OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 31 "And everything about him, body and mind, Tells a foul tale of Time." Hélas! hélas! j'ai cinquante ans, is the refrain of a regretful chanson of Béranger's on his fiftieth birthday, in which he counts up his wrinkles (or rather they are too many for him), and complains that "A cet âge, tout nous échappe ; Le fruit meurt sur l'arbre jauni," and enumerates among the contingencies of vieillesse such maux cuisants as gout, and blindness, and deafness, that everybody makes fun of; and then, "Ciel! j'entends la Mort, qui, joyeuse, Arrive en se frottant les mains. A ma porte la fossoyeuse Frappe with a knock that will make itself heard, will be answered,— will not be put off with a Not at Home. Hasten, my friend, writes Landor to Sir W. Napier, the work begun,― "For daily dimmer grows our sun, Some call him slow, some find him fast, But all he overtakes at last, Unless they run and will not wait, But overleap life's flower-turned gate.” John Evelyn thankfully enters in his diary, on October 31st, 1665, this memorandum :-"I was this day 45 years of age, wonderfully preserved, for which I bless God for His infinite goodness towards me." He lived on for upwards of forty years from that birthday. So did Henry Crabb Robinson, who, some forty-seven years before he died, complained in his diary of a depressing sense of the early decay of his faculties, with little reason enough. Thomas Hood writes in 1844:To-day is my birthday-forty-five-but I can't tell how old I feel, enough to be your grandfather at least, and give you advice," he tells his doctor. At the same age we find Wash 66 . ington Irving writing to Mr. Brevort :- "Your account of yourself is particularly encouraging, 'that you might pass yourself off for a fresh bachelor of 35.' think I am beginning to wear old as am gradually increasing in the belt. grow hardened and shameless in the matter;" which might be the worst sign of all. I must confess I doth a garment, and However, I begin to As Robert Herrick has it, in perhaps the most familiar of his lyrics, "That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; We are old fellows, it is said, from the moment the fire begins to go out. And when is that? Forty-five is old age's accepted terminus à quo. "I don't mind much," says the medical Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, "those slipshod lines Johnson wrote to Thrale, telling her about life's declining from thirty-five; the furnace is in full blast for ten years longer." The Romans are accordingly said to have come very near the mark, in making the age of enlistment reach from seventeen to forty-six years. Crabbe's Tales of the Hall contain a realistic picture of the gradual onset of senescence. Forty-five plus one is the date. "Six years had passed, and forty ere the six, When time began to play his usual tricks; The locks once comely in a virgin's sight, Locks of pure brown, displayed the encroaching white; The blood, once fervid, now to cool began, And Time's strong pressure to subdue the man. I rode or walked as I was wont before, But now the bounding spirit was no more; A moderate pace would now my body heat; I ceased to hunt; my horses pleased me less- |