beauty was the mother: the aged grand-dame was the child: that was really all. But there are certain thoughts upon which you can vaguely brood for a long time.

"Twill murmur on a thousand years,
And flow as now it flows.

"And here, on this delightful day,
I cannot choose but think
How oft, a vigorous man, I lay

Beside this fountain's brink.
"My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,

For the same sound is in my ears

Which in those days I heard." " said on the subject. And it has always apThat is really the sum of what is to be peared to me that Mr. Dickens has shown does not always characterize him, when he an amount of philosophical insight which wrote certain reflections, which he puts in the mouth of one Mr. Roker, who was a why it should be so; but these words are turnkey in the Fleet Prison. I do not know to me more strikingly truthful than almost any others which the eminent author ever produced:

You remember reading how upon a day, not many years since, certain miners, working far under ground, came upon the body of a poor fellow who had perished in the suffocating pit forty years before. Some chemical agent, to which the body had been -an agent prepared in the laborsubjectedatory of nature-had effectually arrested the progress of decay. They brought it up to the surface: and for a while, till it crumbled away, through exposure to the atmosphere, it lay there, the image of a fine sturdy young man. No convulsion had passed over the face in death: the features were tranquil; the hair was black as jet. No one recognized the face: a generation had grown up since the day on which the miner went down his shaft for the last time. But a tottering, old woman, who had hurried from her cot-Bless my dear eyes,' said Mr. Roker, shaking "You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? tage at hearing the news, came up: and she his head slowly from side to side, and gazing knew again the face which through all these abstractedly out of the grated window before years she had never quite forgot. The poor him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceminer was to have been her husband the day terday that he whopped the coal-heaver down at ful scene of his early youth, it seems but yesafter that on which he died. They were the Fox-under-the-Hill, by the wharf there. I rough people, of course, who were looking think I can see him now, a coming up the Strand on: a liberal education and refined feelings between two street-keepers, a little sobered by are not deemed essential to the man whose the bruising, with a patch o' winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that 'ere lovely work it is to get up coals, or even tin: but bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a there were no dry eyes there when the gray- following at his heels. What a rum thing Time headed old pilgrim cast herself upon the is, aint it, Neddy?'" youthful corpse, and poured out to its deaf ear many words of endearment, unused for forty years. It was a touching contrast: the one so old, the other so young. They had both been young, these long years ago: but time had gone on with the living, and stood still with the dead. It is difficult to account for the precise kind and degree of feeling with which we should have witnessed the little picture. I state the fact: I can say no more. I mention it in proof of my principle, that a certain vague pensiveness is the result of musing upon the lapse of time; and a certain undefinable pathos of incident which brings strongly home to us that lapse and its effects.

any

"In silence Matthew lay, and eyed

The spring beneath the tree:
And thus the dear old man replied,
The gray-haired man of glee:

No check, no stay, that streamlet fears-
How merrily it goes?

Here we find, truthfully represented, an essential mood of the human mind. It is a more pleasing picture, perhaps, that comes back upon us in startling freshness, making then, and our sentiment with regard to time us wonder if it is really so long ago since is more elegantly expressed; but it really comes to this. You can say no more of time than that it is a strange, undefinable, inexplicable thing; and when, by some caprice of memory, some long-departed scene comes vividly back, what more definite thing can you do than just shake your head, and gaze abstractedly, like Mr. Roker? Like distant bells upon the breeze, some breath from childhood shows us plainly for a moment the little thing that was ourself. What more can you do but look at the picture, and feel that it is strange? More important things have been forgotten; but you remember how, when you were four years old, you ran a race along a path with a green slope beside it, and watched the small shadow keeping pace with you along the green slope; or you

and sit humbly at his table, because he is an earl or a duke!

But though all this be so, there is a sense in which I interpret the clinging to youth, in which there is nothing contemptible about it, but much that is touching and pleasing. I abominate the padded, rouged, dyed old sham; but I heartly respect the man or woman, pensive and sad, as some little circumstance has impressed upon them the fact that they are growing old. A man or woman is a fool, who is indignant at being called the old lady or the old gentleman when these phrases state the truth; but there is nothing foolish or unworthy when some such occurrence brings it home to us, with something of a shock, that we are no longer reckoned among the young, and that the innocent and impressionable days of childhood (so well remembered) are beginning to be far away. We are drawing nearer, we know, to certain solemn realities of which we speak much and feel little; the undiscovered country (humbly sought through the pilgrimage of life) is looming in the distance before. We feel that life is not long, and is not commonplace, when it is regarded as the portal

possible to assume the position of the infant phenomenon, you still find many men anxious to represent themselves as a good deal younger than they are. To the population of Britain generally, ten years elapse before one census is followed by the next; but some persons, in these ten years, grow no more than two or three years older. Let me confess to an extreme abhorrence of such men. Their conduct affects me with an indescribable disgust. I dislike it more than many things which in themselves are probably more evil morally. Such men are, in the essential meaning of the word, humbugs. They are shams; impostures; false pretences. They are an embodied falsehood; their very personality is a lie; and you don't know what about them may next prove to be a deception. Looking at a man who says he is forty-three when in fact he is above sixty, I suspect him all over. I am in doubt whether his hair, his teeth, his eyes, are real. I do not know whether that breadth of chest be the development of manly bone and muscle, or the skilful padding of the tailor. I am not sure how much is the man, and how much the work of his valet. I suspect that his whiskers and moustache are to eternity. And probably nothing will dyed. I look at his tight boots, and think bring back the season of infancy and early how they must be tormenting his poor old youth upon any thoughtful man's mind so corny feet. I admire his affected buoyancy vividly as the sense that he is growing old. of manner, and think how the miserable How short a time since then! You look at creature must collapse when he finds himself your great brown hand. It seems but yesteralone, and is no longer compelled by the day since a boy-companion (gray now) tried presence of company to put himself on the to print your name upon the little paw, and stretch, and carry on that wretched acting. there was not room. You remember it (is it When I see the old reptile whispering in a five-and-twenty years since?) as it looked corner to a girl of eighteen, or furtively when laid on the head of a friendly dog, two squeezing her in a waltz, I should like ex- or three days before you found him poisoned tremely to take him by the neck, and shake and dead; and helped, not without tears, to him till he came into the pieces of which he bury him in the garden under an apple-tree. is made up. And when I have heard (long You see, as plainly as if you saw it now, his ago) such a one, with a hideous gloating brown eye, as it looked at you in life for the relish telling a profane or indecent story; or last time. And as you feel these things, you instilling cynical and impious notions of life quite unaffectedly and sincerely put off, time and things into the minds of young lads; or after time, the period at which you will ac(more disgusting still) using phrases of cept it as a fact, that you are old. Twentydouble meaning in the presence of innocent eight, thirty, thirty-five, forty-eight, mark young women, and enjoying their innocent years on reaching which you will still feel ignorance of his sense; I have thought that yourself young; many men honestly think I was beholding as degraded a phase of hu- that sixty-five or sixty-eight is the prime of man nature as you will find on the face of life. A less amiable accompaniment of this this sinful world. O venerable age; gray, pleasing belief is often found in a dispowise, kindly, sympathetic; before which I sition to call younger men (and not very shall never cease reverently to bend, respect-young) boys. I have heard that word uttered ing even what I may (wrongly perhaps) in a very spiteful tone, as though it were a esteem your prejudices; that you should be name of great reproach. There are few epicaricatured and degraded in that foul, old leering satyr! And if there be a thing on earth that disgusts one more than even the thought of the animal himself, it is to think of ministers of religion (prudently pious) who will wait meekly in his ante-cbamber

thets which I have ever heard applied in a manner betokening greater bitterness, than that of a clever lad. You remember how Sir Robert Walpole hurled the charge of youth against Pitt. You remember how Pitt (or Dr. Johnson for him) defended himself with

great force of argument against the imputation. Possibly in some cases envy is at the root of the matter. Not every man has the magnanimity of Sir Bulwer Lytton, who tells us so frankly and so often how much he would like to be young again if he could.

we all know that time goes on as fast when its progress is unmarked as when it is noted. And each day that the coat went on was an onward stage as truly as the day when the coat went off; but in this world we must take things as they are to our feelings: and there is something that very strongly ap

To grow old is so serious a matter, that it always appears to me as if there were some-peals to our feeling in a decided beginning thing like profanation in putting the fact or its attendant circumstances in a ludicrous manner. It is not a fit thing to joke about. A funny man might write a comic description of the way in which starving sailors on a raft used up their last poor allotments of bread and water, and watched with sinking hearts their poor stock decrease. Or he might record in a fashion that some people would laugh at, the gradual sinking of a family which had lost its means through degree after degree in the social scale, till the workhouse was reached at last. But I do not think there is any thing really amusing in the spectacle of a human being giving up hold after hold to which he had clung, and sinking always lower and lower; and there is no doubt that, in a physical sense, we soon come to do all that in the process of growing old. And though you may put each little mortification, each petty coming down, in a way amusing to bystanders, it should always be remembered that each may imply a severe pang on the part of the man himself. We smile when Mr. Dickens tells us concerning his hero, Mr. Tupman, that

or a decided ending. Do not laugh, thoughtless folk, at the poor old maid, who persists in going bareheaded long after she ought to have taken to caps. You cannot know how much further away that change would make her days of childhood seem: how much more remote and dim and faint it would make the little life, the face, the voice of the young brother or sister that died when they both · were children together. Do not fancy that it is mere personal vanity which prompts that clinging to apparent youth: feelings which are gentle, pure, and estimable may protest against any change from the old familiar way. Do not smile at the phrases of the house when there are gray-headed boys, and girls on the lower side of forty-five: it would be a terrible sacrifice, it would make a terrible change, to give up the old names. You thoughtless young people are ready to deride Mr. Smith when he appears in his new wig. You do not think how, when poor Smith went to Truefitt's to get it, he thought many thoughts of the long-departed mother, whom he remembers dimly on her sick-bed smoothing down her little boy's hair, thick enough then. And when you see Mr. Robinson puffing up the hill with purpled face and laboring breath, do you think that poor Robinson does not remember the days when he was the best runner at school? Perhaps he tells you at considerable length about these days. Well, listen patiently: some day you may be telling long stories too. There is a peculiar sadness in thinking of Now, although Mr. Tupman was an ex-exertions of body or mind to which we were ceedingly fat man physically, and morally once equal, but to which we are not equal (to say the truth) a very great fool, you may now. You remember the not very earnest rely upon it that as each little circumstance Swift, conscious that the "decay at the top" had occurred which his biographer has re- had begun, bursting into tears as he read corded, it would be a very serious circum- one of his early works, and exclaiming, stance in the feeling of poor Tupman him-"Heavens, what a genius I had when I self. And this not nearly so much for the wrote that!" What is there more touching little personal mortification implied in each than the picture of poor Sir Walter, wheeled step of expanding bulk and lessening agility, like a child in a chair through the rooms but because each would be felt as a milestone, at Abbotsford, and suddenly exclaiming, marking the progress of Tupman from his "Come, this is sad idleness," and insisting cradle to his grave. Each would be some- on beginning to dictate a new tale, in which thing to signify that the innocence and fresh- the failing powers of the great magician apness of childhood were left so much further peared so sadly, that large as its marketable behind, and that the reality of life was grow-value would have been, it never was suffered ing more hard and prosaic. It is some feel- to appear in print. Probably the sense of ing like this which makes it a sad thing to enfeebled faculties is a sadder thing than lay aside an old coat which one has worn for the sense of diminished physical power. a long time. It is a decided step. Of course Probably Sir Isaac Newton, in his later days,

"Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it disappeared from within the range of Tupman's vision; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon the borders of the white cravat; but the soul of Tupman had known no change."

when he sat down to his own mathematical | seek in vain to climb the trees he climbed demonstrations, and could not understand in youth, or to play at leapfrog as then, still them or follow them, felt more bitterly the he is conscious that his life on the whole has wear of advancing time than the gray-headed been a progress; that he is on the whole Highlander sitting on a stone at his cottage better now than he was in those days which door in the sunshine, and telling you how, were his best days physically; that to be long ago, he could breast the mountain with lord chancellor, albeit a venerable one, is, the speed of a deer; or than the crippled as the world goes, a more eminent thing soldier, who leans upon his crutch, and tells than to be the gayest and most active of how, many years ago, that shaky old hand midshipmen. And so on the whole he is had cut down the French cuirassier. But content to grow old, because he feels that in in either case it is a sad thing to think of growing he has not on the whole been comexertions once put forth, and work once ng down hill. done, which could not be done or put forth now. Change for the worse is always a sorrowful thing. And the aged man, in the respect of physical power, and the capacity for intellectual exertion, has "seen better days." You do not like to think that in any respect you are falling off. You are not pleased at being told that ten years ago you wrote a plainer hand or spoke in a rounder voice. It is mortifying to find that whereas you could once walk at five miles an hour, you can now accomplish no more than three and a half. Now, in a hundred ways, at every turn, and by a host of little wounding facts, we are compelled to feel as we grow old that we are falling off. As the complexion roughens, as the hair thins off, as we come to stoop, as we blow tremendously if we attempt to run, the man of no more than middle age is conscious of a bodily decadence. And advancing years make the wise man sadly conscious of a mental decadence too. Let us be thankful that if physical and intellectual decline must come at a certain stage of growing old, there are respects in which, so long as we live, we may have the comfort of thinking that we are growing better. The higher nature may daily be reaching a nobler development; when "heart and flesh faint and fail," when the clay tenement is turning frail and shattered, the better part within may show in all moral grace as but a little lower than the angels. Age need not necessarily be "dark and unlovely," as Ossian says it is; and the conviction that in some respect, that in the most important of all respects, we are growing better, tends mightily to strip age of that sense of falling off which is the bitterest thing about it. And as the essential nature of growing old ;-its essence as a sad thing; -lies in the sense of decadence, the conviction that in almost any thing we are gaining ground has a wonderful power to enable us cheerfully to grow old. A man will contentedly grow fatter, balder, and puffier, if he feels assured that he is pushing on to eminence at the bar or in politics; and if he takes his seat upon the woolsack even at the age of seventy-five, though he might now

The supremely mortifying thing is, to feel that the physical decadence which comes with growing old, is not counterbalanced by any improvement whatsoever. We shall not mind much about growing less agile and less beautiful, if we think that we are growing wiser and better. The gouty but wealthy merchant, who hobbles with difficulty to his carriage, feels that after all he has made an advance upon those days in which, if free from gout, he was devoid of pence; and if he did not hobble, he had no carriage into which he might get in that awkward manner. The gray-haired old lady who was a beauty once, is consoled for her growing old, if in her age she is admitted to the society of the county, while in her youth she was confined to the society of the town. Make us feel that we are better in something, and we shall be content to be worse in many things; but it is miserable to think that in all things we are falling off, or even in all things standing still. A man would be very much mortified to think that at fifty he did not write materially better sermons, essays, or articles than he did at five-and-twenty. In many things he knows the autumn of life is a falling-off from its spring-time. He has ceased to dance; his voice quavers abominably when he tries to sing; he has no fancy now for climbing hills, and he shirks walks of forty miles a day. Perhaps deeper wrinkles have been traced by time on the heart than on the forehead, and the early freshness of feeling is gone. But surely, in mellowed experience, in sobered and sound views of things, in tempered expectations, in patience, in sympathy, in kindly charity, in insight into God's ways and dealings, he is better now a thousand times than he was then. He has worked his way through the hectic stage in which even able and thoughtful men fancy that Byron was a great poet. sounder judgment and a severer taste direct him now; in all things, in short, that make the essence of the manly nature, he is a better and further advanced man than he ever was before. The physical nature says, by many little signs, WE ARE GOING DOWN HILL; the spiritual nature testifies by many

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