so the sorrowful epistle concludes with the sharpest grief of all:  “My female friends, who could bear with me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me.”  It is odd that Montaigne should have hit upon the wine also as among the subsidia senectuti; although the sage Michael complains, as you will remember, that old men do not relish their wine, or at least the first glass, because “the palate is furred with phlegms.”  But I care little either for the liquor or the lackeys, and not much, I fear, at present, for “the female friends.”  I have, then, nothing left for it but to take violently to books; for I doubt not I shall find almost any house convenient, and I am sure of one at last which I can claim by a title not to be disturbed by all the precedents of Cruise, and in which no mortal shall have a contingent remainder.

To books, then, I betake myself,—­to books, “the immortal children” of “the understanding, courage, and abilities” of the wise and good,—­ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance,—­books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the Spartan boys sobriety.  Montaigne “never travelled without books, either in peace or war”; and as I found them pleasant in happier days, so I find them pleasant now.  Of course, much of this omnivorous reading is from habit, and, invita Minerva, cannot be dignified by the name of study,—­that stiff, steady, persistent, uncompromising application of the mind, by virtue of which alone the Pons Asinorum can be crossed, and the Forty-Seventh Problem of Euclid—­which I entirely disbelieve—­mastered.

I own to a prodigious respect, entertained since my Sophomore year at the University, for those collegiate youth whose terribly hard study of Bourdon and Legendre seems to have such a mollifying effect upon their heads,—­but, as the tradesmen say, that thing is “not in my line.”  I would rather have a bundle of bad verses which have been consigned to the pastry-cook.  I suppose—­for I have been told so upon good authority —­that, if “equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal.”  I do not see why they should not be, and, as a citizen of the United States of America, the axiom seems to me to be entitled to respect.  When a youthful person, with a piece of chalk in his hand, before commencing his artistic and scientific achievements upon the black-board, says:  “Let it be granted that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point,” I invariably answer, “Of course,—­by all manner of means,”—­although you know, dear Don, that, if I should put him upon mathematical proof of the postulate, I might bother him hugely.  But when we come to the Fourteenth Proposition of Euclid’s Data,—­when I am required to admit, that, “if a magnitude together with a given magnitude has a given ratio to another magnitude, the excess