taught it. It was done by one of the Bush blacks, who are much cleverer, honester, and thinner than the Coast blacks, who live on fish. Catching the kangaroo, grubs, snakes, guanas, wild-honey, fern roots, and bunion, seem the employment of the first; while oysters and snappers are the things needful for the last. · X. Y. Z.

OLD AGE.

"Oh, Sir, you are old,

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of her confine; you should be ruled, and led
By some discretion."-King Lear.

"OLD age, indeed!" methinks I hear a maiden reader, who has passed her th year,* exclaim with an indignant toss of the head, and a hard and forcible expiration," Old age, indeed! what does the fellow mean? I'll be whipped if this article be not written by that odious curate, whom we got turned out of the parish for preaching last summer against rouge and waltzing?"-" Age, Madam, do you say?-all twaddle-no such thing now-a-days, depend upon it. No old people, now; haven't seen an old man these thirty years."-"I beg your pardon, Sir; without meaning to play the saint, I must insist upon it, that yours is a very unscriptural doctrine. Age there most certainly is, and we must all come to it. There's Archdeacon Crump has long been of the fuimus family, and can't hold out much longer; and the Dean is a very old man indeed. I'm only sixty-four myself; and but for this cough, and now and then a touch of the gout, I'm as good as ever I was in my life; but I must be old some day or other for all that." Rochefoucauld has well remarked, that “ peu de gens savent être vieux;" and the single observation is well worth all the flimsy sophistry and stoical cant of the Cato major, which serves only to put the incommodity it celebrates more prominently in evidence. If life itself is a blessing, then is the plenitude of life preferable to decrepitude; and however Providence, in its mercy, may now and then have suited the back to the burden, yet is it not less a burden because it may be well borne. Strong sensations, powerful volitions, and muscles and joints to do the bidding of the will, constitute the perfection of physical existence; but age is the reverse of all this, to say nothing of the maladies and the dependence it brings in its train. Old men have told the world, and the world have believed it, that the decrepitude of the body is the maturity of the mind; and it is amusing to observe how Bacon,† in balancing the faults of youth and of age, leans lightly on the last. The fact however is against the philosopher. Charron, who was in all things the opponent of humbug, and who got so much the start of the times in which he wrote, justly observes of age, Elle nous attache encore plus de rides en l'esprit, qu'au visage; et ne se voit point d'ames qui en vieillissant, ne sentent l'aigre et le moisi.' To grow old is not necessarily to grow either wise or good; but, on the contrary, it is

* Aulus Gellius fills up this blank with forty-six; but the fair reader is requested to use her own discretion, always however employing a pencil, that, she may amend the record when her mind changes on the subject. Young ladies of fifteen think young ladies of thirty very old; but they alter their opinion as they gain experience. + Essays.

most frequently only to change one set of vices for another, and that too not for the better. Chagrin, disappointment, and satiety, make up the wisdom of the mature. Against this vain pretence to superior wisdom, a pretence which gives authority, în public and private affairs, to those who are the most encumbered with prejudices, impeded by habits, and the farthest in arrear with the improvements of the times, it may be sufficient to notice the physical fact that, in latter life, the brain contracts in all its dimensions, and its substance becomes condensed, and partakes of the same super-solidity which affects the joints with stiffness, and destroys the mobility of the muscles. Those in France, whose interest it is to preserve the world in a perpetual infancy, and to maintain unimpaired all the vices and mistakes of a barbarous legislation, have provided that the office of making laws should be confided only to persons who have passed the vigour and honesty of youth and this piece of cunning is decisive against the assumed superiority, either moral or intellectual, of advanced life. Age, as Ossian truly says, “is dark and unlovely ;" and to bear it with patience and dignity requires some firmness.

It is not, however, in the grand serieur that the chief difficulty lies; for firmness under inevitable necessities is no very uncommon quality. The thief at the gallows can meet his fate as bravely as Cato or Regu lus; and many a condemned felon might invite his friends, with Addison, to "see how a Christian can die." So ably, indeed, do the dealers out of consolation "perform their spiriting," that the most atrocious criminals often meet Jack Ketch with a confidence in futurity, to which the wise and the good cannot always attain :-a confidence, by the by, which, however comfortable to the patient, is any thing but auxiliary to the purposes of penal infliction. It must be a great consolation to the whole tribe of murderers, housebreakers, and highwaymen, not only to perceive the ease with which the last scene of their existence is gotten over, but to understand how little a good and useful life is necessary to an happy eternity. All men wish to go to Heaven upon cheap terms; and surely none can be easier than a gratuitous" call," when the pleasures of life have faded from view. The vicious must be especially delighted thus to discover that they have a better market in the world to come, than their stupid neighbours, who have entertained an old-fashioned respect for "mine and thine." But to return to the subject in hand, it is chiefly in the lighter departments of life, in the thousand futilities which flesh is heir to, that men find it so hard to grow old with decency. Yet, if the slightest of these particularities is misunderstood or neglected, your old man becomes a dire bore to society; and is as tiresome to himself as to his fastidicus acquaintances. The invention of natural wigs, (or to use a more loyal phrase, of heads of hair,) and of false teeth, has done much for the persons of the aged; and the tailor, if he be an artist of "any pith and likelihood," can convert the merest codger into a very respectable beau. By thus keeping out of sight the hideous in the physical man, the epoch of senility may be adjourned to "this day six months;" but the misfortune of it is, that these external advantages only seduce the inconsiderate owners of them to overlook the more important deficiencies of the moral man, and to forget the want of" that within which passeth show," and which should

serve to fill out and render substantial the "trappings and the suits" of a green and vigorous maturity. There are stains and deficiencies of the mind which require concealment as much as the "boneless gum" or the bald head; and these natural decays are the less easily managed, because they so frequently escape our own consciousness. All the Feinagles in esse and in posse, together, cannot supply a doting old proser with an artificial memory, to prevent his endless repetitions of the same tiresome story; nor are there any cosmetics of the mind strong enough to wash away the freckles of avarice, a vice which in latter life eats into the finest dispositions, like rust upon polished steel. False teeth are very well, as far as they go; but the devil of it is there are no false digestions in the shops, and consequently no false tempers. It is astonishing how much pettishness proceeds from flatulence, and how goodhumouredly grand-papas would stomach the levities of the young folks, if they could but master the crudities of the prima via. Alas! that there should be no buckram for stuffing the shrinking dimensions of a faded intellect; no rouge for hiding the " green and yellow melancholy" of the mental complexion. We may cram our stockings with wool into a decent resemblance of a chairman's calf; but there is no giving an artificial muscularity of mind to bear the burden of accumulating infirmity without querulousness and without ill-temper. Every period of our "seven ages" has its peculiar duties and its decencies; and to these the old man comes as unprepared as the child;--but age has this additional disadvantage, that while in early life we anticipate futurity, and try conclusions respecting conduct to come, age creeps upon us unperceived, and is as unexpected as it is unwelcome. Who is there old enough to have been told by his congratulating friends that he wears well; who did not receive the first intelligence of that fact with surprise and displeasure? For my own part, I honestly confess, the compliment struck me like a thunderbolt! First, I thought my sympathising informant very rude, and then I set him down for a fool. The stealthy and Tarquin-like steps of time in vain leave their indelible impressions behind them. Crows' feet on the temples, and gray hairs in the whiskers, do not arouse attention. Perhaps it may be the necessity for shaving that prevents one from marking these changes in a face which one is accustomed to look at every morning. If so, may not the final cause of the hairy excrescence be found in a kind intention to accustom us to a fact as deplorable as it is inevitable? Be this, however, as it may, your gray beard no more leads to wholesome reflec tion, than if it were a pigtail dangling quite out of sight; and we go on, frisking and jaunting it through the grand climateric, as if we were still in our teens. In vain does Nature stiffen our knees and supersede the tooth-drawer in his functions; in vain does she thicken the hearing, and suggest the comfort of a pair of spectacles; she has, by conferring on us what Falstaff calls "the malady of not marking," rendered all these good gifts useless to edification, and exposed us to a thousand ridiculous mistakes. Like a looking-glass, that reflects all but itself, the experience of the old man bears upon every thing but the wants of the individual in whom it resides. All its wise saws and instances serve to illustrate the life through which he has passed, and which is gone for ever; but are totally inapplicable to the space he has yet to cover; so that, to Sept.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCIII.

the very last, there is no fool like the old fool. "When the age is in," says Shakspeare," the wit is out," an observation which is forced upon us, not more by the actual supremacy in folly of the lean and slippered pantaloon, than by the absurd contrast between his boastful pretensions to wisdom, and the inconsequence of his actions. "Young folks," the proverb tells us, "think old folks fools, but old folks know the young to be so." It will, however, abate the force of this dictum to remember that the aged are the makers of proverbs; and if lions were painterswe all know the consequence. "Whom folly pleases, and whose follies please," can never be applied to the aged; because the perpetual contradiction between their actions and their "seeming" renders their absurdities ungracious and awkward. If there is any point upon which a man might be supposed to appreciate himself justly, it surely must be his fitness for love; but in proportion as Dan Cupid takes to his wings, and leaves "deponent" in the solitary possession of a worn-out constitution, the demon of Vanity gets a greater hold of his silly pate, till the victim of the flattering error finds the realities of passion less troublesome and overmastering than its "horrible imaginings." Nothing renders a man more exquisitely absurd than superannuated gallantry. "This is the monstrosity of love, that the will is infinite and the execution confined." Many an honest rake has run through the dissipations of youth, without incurring any of their greater penalties, to be shipwrecked utterly by the loves of his latter Lammas. In love, as in money, we can accommodate our expenditure to our natural wants, with some reference to our means; but in gratifying caprices there are no bounds, and no economy. This solitary feature in the human physiognomy serves to occupy half the comedies and half the tales of all nations; but the old beau continues incorrigible, and laughs, night after night, at the Lord Ogleby's of the stage, without the slightest reference to himself. The great majority of criminal punishments incurred by irregular indulgences of la belle passion, are inflicted upon persons somewhat beyond the middle age; and the greatest number of ludicrous absurdities in love are committed when men have already "some smack of the saltness of time." In these matters Heaven protect the old! the young may take care of themselves. In fact, there is something so respectable in the passion which fulfils the great design of nature, that its very excesses are matter for high poetry in that season of life to which it is appropriate; but the most respectable tendre of the most respectable middle-aged gentleman will continue ridiculous, treat it how you will. With all the ennobling rust of antiquity, and with all the beauty of his verses, Anacreon is, after all, only a silly old fellow, who goes on scanning and drinking, when he ought to be making money and saving his soul. The conduct of aged persons towards females need not, however, be wholly unmarked by a sense of the difference of sex. There is, on the contrary, something very pleasing and touching in the reverential deportment of a polite old gentleman towards that beauty which he does not cease to admire because he can no longer enjoy; while we are justly offended at the brutality and snappishness which so often proceed from selfish jealousy of the preferences conceded to women. Old men do not like being put out of their way; and of this a droll instance is recorded of

Voltaire. On some occasion, when he was particularly desirous of shining at dinner, he observed that the attention of the company was distracted from his bons mots by the bosoms of his Genevese handmaids, which, as the weather was warm, were rather more exposed than usual. This was a rivalry which the philosopher of Ferney could ill endure; and after struggling in silence for some time with his annoyance, he suddenly burst forth, to the surprise of the abigails, with "Gorge par ci, gorge par là; allez à tous les diables!" The sort of gallantry which becomes an old man seems to spring exclusively from natural politeness and good feeling. It is often not without a slight touch of formality and old fashion; but it is in all things the antipodes of that attention which seems to advance a pretence to favours, and which is more marked by indelicate innuendoes than by an abnegation of self in the furtherance of the ease and comfort of the women. The obtrusive and insinuating gallantry to which the underbred Irishman is especially prone, is sufficiently offensive in the young and ardent; but it is wholly without excuse in those in whom it must be evidently mere façon. When old men indulge in this silly practice, they are also in the habit of carrying it much farther than their juniors, and create immeasurable disgust, both to the blushing parties addressed and to the lookers on.

Less offensive, perhaps, but not less ridiculous, is the indecent levity of the aged in their social intercourse with the juniors of their own sex. There is no line in morals finer than that which separates the indulgence and facility of old persons for the gayer follies of youth, from the absurd participation in boyish vices of the ci-devant jeune homme. An old man need not be as sententious as Seneca; nor need he sit mumchance when the sports of the field are discussed. Still less is he justifiable in ill-timed appeals to religion, and in imposing an hypocritical seriousness of demeanour upon the young, which is foreign to their nature, and therefore unbecoming. But he must not, like Falstaff, talk of " us youth," and boast of follies and vices which he is no longer in a condition to commit. In all such cases, however, it is safer to yield something to the genius of the hour than to be too morose; and to chime in lightly and playfully with the younger part of the company (preserving always in such gaiety a sense of personal dignity and decorum), than by an habitual sourness and rebuke to destroy the cheerfulness of a season, which once passed can never return.

Perhaps the great source of all the social mistakes of aged persons is a sense of the feebleness and inferiority which is creeping on them; an instinct that the world is eluding their grasp, and a conviction of the necessity for that resignation which they are disposed to resist with all their remaining powers. This is strongly exemplified in those who have become parents early in life, and who are annoyed at being pushed from their stools before they are inclined to quit them. Mothers of a certain age, with strong remaining pretensions to beauty, are particularly nervous and fidgety in all that respects their daughters, and frequently make themselves very troublesome in society by their rivalry with the rising generation. The love of power is a weakness which increases with indulgence. Young men are contented with being their own masters; the old desire to master others; and when their children grow up around them, they are apt to forget that they have now to deal