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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 prime vic. 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.

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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 mum-chance 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

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with their equals, perhaps with their superiors; and they become petulant and unbearable by a perpetual assumption of an authority which is no longer acknowledged. This is rendered more saliently absurd, where an estate is in the question. According to the law of primogeniture, the landholder contracts an obligation to die and make room for his successor, at or about the time when his son comes of age. The longer protraction of life is on mere sufferance, an usurpation. Tempus abire tibi. This the parent is apt to feel: and he is generally very awkward in his false position. Sometimes, especially on his son's marriage, he makes a Lear-like distribution of his estate, reserving to himself only an annuity out of the land, which is seldom an happy arrangeMore frequently, the sense of being in the way only produces an horrible jealousy of the successor. The son's allowance appears so like a quit-rent, that it is paid with a bad grace, or it is made insufficient for maintaining the young man in his proper rank. Hence eternal bickerings and unworthy contestations, plainly indicative of the unwholesomeness of the law from which they flow; and proving how far legislation upon false principles can corrupt and degrade human nature. Of these quarrels the graceless make a jest, but they are the sources of much bitterness and misery to kind and benevolent natures. Whether the dislike of abdication, which besets the aged, shows itself in an hateful morosity and tyranny over the younger and more joyous part of the community, or is manifested in a foolish endeavour to protract the season of enjoyment, when the organs are no longer fitted to receive it, it is still the same impulse; and the variety, vast as it is, is wholly an affair of temperament. In old maids it sometimes shows itself in calumny, prudery, and plain clothes, sometimes in coquetry, grimace, and pink ribbons; sometimes in a desperate effort to retain the men, sometimes in as desperate a refuge in the love of heaven; but in both cases it is the same desire of dominion, the same painful and afflictive sense of power escaping from the reluctant hand; it is the convulsion of debility, the struggle which precedes dissolution. To conquer this infirmity requires a strong mind, and a life spent in the exertion of self-control. More frequently an exemption from the faults of age is the result of an happy temperament, of that cheerfulness which accommodates itself to all the accidents of life, and which is ever graceful, because it is always natural and unaffected. In this respect the French are greatly our superiors. The exuberance of their animal spirits softens down, in advanced life, into a cheerfulness that is exquisitely amiable, and their habitual good breeding never leaves them. Most travelled Englishmen have enjoyed the acquaintance of Denon, to whose apartments they were not more attracted by the rarity of his collection, than by the cheerful gaiety of his manners, the solidity and variety of his information, and the frankness with which he communicated it. Denon was a perfect model of what an old man should be in society. Gay and good-humoured with men, delicate in his attentions to females, considerate to all, he adapted his conversation with care to the intellects and pursuits of those whom he addressed. In displaying his treasures to the various classes of persons who pressed around him, he contrived always to find something which he could place in a light congenial to the character of each; and the same adaptation marked his general intercourse with society. There

was not a single grain of sourness or austerity in his whole composition; no regret for the past, no weak and childish apprehension of the future disturbed the serenity of a mind which was at peace with all the world. Neat in his person, without foppery, exempt from all disgusting habits, he had no claims to make on the indulgence of his auditor: and though distinguished throughout all Europe for his talents, his acquirements, and the space he had occupied in the literary world, he had no Johnsonian arrogance to excuse, no assumption of authority to tolerate. Simple, playful, and unpretending, he was universally sought for in all societies, and he was the life and the soul of the small but educated and refined circle, of which he was himself the centre. His body partook of this elasticity of mind. He was marvellously exempted from disease, and the temperance of his life left him, at its close, more alert than many men are in the vigour of their existence; so that, though he died full of years, his death might rather be considered as an accident, than as the accomplishment of his natural destiny. On the Continent, this is a character by no means uncommon. La Croix the mathematician, Delfico of Naples, La Fayette, De Tracy, Bonstetten and Dumont of Geneva, the Archbishop of Tarentum, are each, in their several ways, delightful and amiable companions, over whom time has passed without diminishing their social good qualities. If it were admissible to cite individuals from among the undistinguished walks of life, the list might be extended to an inconvenient length; but every one who has lived abroad will find in his memory abundant materials for verifying the assertion. Why are amiable old men less frequent among ourselves? Is it that society in general is less well understood with us than it is abroad; and that all ranks and ages on the Continent afford better companions than with us? or is it that there is something in the temperament and habits of the people that conducts them to a mellow and richer maturity?

M.

THE RETURN OF FRANCIS THE FIRST.

DART forth like light, my Arab steed,
Leave far behind detested Spain-

From torturing doubt, from bondage freed,
I feel I am a King again!*

Farewell, my children! had my heart
A place for aught but frenzied joys,
"Twere bitter thus with ye to part,
My own belov'd-my noble boys!

I go your blest return shall be

My guiding hope, my tenderest care,

Soon, soon shall France my children see

The glory of their father share.

Forward, my steed! as on we fly,

What crowding thoughts rush through my brain

But oh, exulting memory!

I am—I am a King again!

* His exulting exclamation after crossing the river Andaye on his release, and

mounting his Arabian horse.-See Robertson.

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