There is one consideration which the author has not placed amongst his four chief disadvantages of growing old,—­which, however, he did not forget, for he notices it incidentally in the dialogue,—­the feeling that we are growing less agreeable to our friends, that our company is less sought after, and that we are, in short, becoming rather ciphers in society.  This, in a condition of high civilisation, is really perhaps felt by most of us as the hardest to bear of all the ills to which old age is liable.  We should not care so much about the younger generation rising up and making us look old, if we did not feel that they are “pushing us from our stools”.  Cato admits that he had heard some old men complain that “they were now neglected by those who had once courted their society”, and he quotes a passage from the comic poet Caecilius

  “This is the bitterest pang in growing old,—­
  To feel that we grow hateful to our fellows”.

But he dismisses the question briefly in his own case by observing with some complacency that he does not think his young friends find his company disagreeable—­an assertion which Scipio and Laelius, who occasionally take part in the dialogue, are far too well bred to contradict.  He remarks also, sensibly enough, that though some old persons are no doubt considered disagreeable company, this is in great measure their own fault:  that testiness and ill-nature (qualities which, as he observes, do not usually improve with age) are always disagreeable, and that such persons attributed to their advancing years what was in truth the consequence of their unamiable tempers.  It is not all wine which turns sour with age, nor yet all tempers; much depends on the original quality.  The old Censor lays down some maxims which, like the preceding, have served as texts for a good many modern writers, and may be found expanded, diluted, or strengthened, in the essays of Addison and Johnson, and in many of their followers of less repute.  “I never could assent”, says Cato, “to that ancient and much-bepraised proverb,—­that ’you must become an old man early, if you wish to be an old man long’”.  Yet it was a maxim which was very much acted upon by modern Englishmen a generation or two back.  It was then thought almost a moral duty to retire into old age, and to assume all its disabilities as well as its privileges, after sixty years or even earlier.  At present the world sides with Cato, and rushes perhaps into the other extreme; for any line at which old age now begins would be hard to trace either in dress or deportment.  “We must resist old age, and fight against it as a disease”.  Strong words from the old Roman; but, undoubtedly, so long as we stop short of the attempt to affect juvenility, Cato is right.  We should keep ourselves as young as possible.  He speaks shrewd sense, again, when he says—­“As I like to see a young man who has something old about him, so I like to see an old man in whom there remains something of the youth:  and he who follows this maxim may become an old man in body, but never in heart”.  “What a blessing it is”, says Southey, “to have a boy’s heart!” Do we not all know these charming old people, to whom the young take almost as heartily as to their own equals in age, who are the favourite consultees in all amusements, the confidants in all troubles?