[Footnote 1:  “A clergyman was complaining of the want of society in the country where he lived, and said, ‘They talk of runts’ (i.e., young cows).  ‘Sir’, said Mr. Salusbury, ’Mr. Johnson would learn to talk of runts;’ meaning that I was a man who would make the most of my situation, whatever it was".—­Boswell’s Life.  Cicero was like Dr. Johnson.]

He is careful, however, to remind his readers that old age, to be really either happy or venerable, must not be the old age of the mere voluptuary or the debauchee; that the grey head, in order to be, even in his pagan sense, “a crown of glory”, must have been “found in the way of righteousness”.  Shakespeare might have learned from Cicero in these points the moral which he puts into the mouth of his Adam—­

  “Therefore mine age is as a lusty winter,
  Frosty but kindly”.

It is a miserable old age, says the Roman, which is obliged to appeal to its grey hairs as its only claim to the respect of its juniors.  “Neither hoar hairs nor wrinkles can arrogate reverence as their right.  It is the life whose opening years have been honourably spent which reaps the reward of reverence at its close”.

In discussing the last of the evils which accompany old age, the near approach of death, Cicero rises to something higher than his usual level.  His Cato will not have death to be an evil at all; it is to him the escaping from “the prison of the body",—­the “getting the sight of land at last after a long voyage, and coming into port”.  Nay, he does not admit that death is death.  “I have never been able to persuade myself”; he says, quoting the words of Cyrus in Xenophon, “that our spirits were alive while they were in these mortal bodies, and died only when they departed out of them; or that the spirit then only becomes void of sense when it escapes from a senseless body; but that rather when freed from all admixture of corporality, it is pure and uncontaminated, then it most truly has sense”.  “I am fully persuaded”, he says to his young listeners, “that your two fathers, my old and dearly-loved friends, are living now, and living that life which only is worthy to be so called”.  And he winds up the dialogue with the very beautiful apostrophe, one of the last utterances of the philosopher’s heart, well known, yet not too well known to be here quoted: 

“It likes me not to mourn over departing life, as many men, and men of learning, have done.  Nor can I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I may trust I was not born in vain; and I depart out of life as out of a temporary lodging, not as out of my home.  For nature has given it to us as an inn to tarry at by the way, not as a place to abide in.  O glorious day! when I shall set out to join that blessed company and assembly of disembodied spirits, and quit this crowd and rabble of life!  For I shall go my way, not only to those great men of whom I spoke, but to my own son Cato, than whom