look forward and take patience.  Fear shrinks before them “like a thing reproved,” not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and revenges of life.  Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous[31] footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story.  Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom’s simples, plain considerations overlooked by youth.  They have matter to communicate, be they never so stupid.  Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the speaker’s detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt.  In virtue, I have said, of the speaker’s detachment—­and this is why, of two old men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests and remain still young.  Thus I have known two young men great friends; each swore by the other’s father; the father of each swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were perpetually by the ears.  This is typical:  it reads like the germ of some kindly[32] comedy.

The old appear in conversation in two characters:  the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic.  The last is perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps the more instructive.  An old gentleman, well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career.  Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years.  What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart—­these are “the real long-lived things"[33] that Whitman tells us to prefer.  Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded teacher’s that a lesson may be learned.  I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is now gathered to his stock—­Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton,[34] and author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished.  Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess.  When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin—­and for that he never failed to apologise, for it went