and to apply the rouge to her nose, instead of her cheeks.  So may the superannuated eagle be pecked at by daws.  But the tale is not probable.  After all, it is but the captious inference of witlings and scoffers, that attributes to mere sexual vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the wisest are not always free.  It may be, that they shrink from the reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution.  In rosy youth, while yet the brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven’s own tint, and the dark tresses turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the throbbing of a heart at ease.  “So like, so very like, is day to day,”—­one primrose scarce more like another.  Whoever saw their first grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that youth is flown for ever?  None but the blessed few that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal blossoms, a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near.  It is a frailty, almost an instance of humanity, to aim at concealing that from others, of which ourselves are painfully conscious.  The herculean Johnson keenly resented the least allusion to the shortness of his sight.  So entirely is man a social animal, so dependent are all his feelings for their very existence upon communication and sympathy, that the “fee griefs,” which none but ourselves are privy to, are forgotten as soon as they are removed from the senses.  The artifices to which so many have recourse to conceal their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves, than to impose on others.  This aversion to growing old is specially natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless.  The borrowed curls, the pencilled eyebrows,

          “The steely-prison’d shape,
  So oft made taper, by constraint of tape,”

the various cosmetic secrets, well-known to the middle ages, not only of the softer sex, are not unseemly in a spinster, so long as they succeed in making her look young.  They are intolerable in a mother of any age.  But we, my dear Christopher, resigned and benevolent old bachelors as we are, can well appreciate the vanity of the aged heart, that sees not its youth renewed in any growing dearer self.  Nothing denotes the advances of life, at once so surely and so pleasantly as children springing up around a good man’s table.  Perhaps our famous Queen, in her latter days, though full of honours as of years, would gladly have changed places with the wife of any yeoman that had a child to receive her last blessing, whose few acres were not to pass away to the hungry expecting son of a hated rival.  Her virginity was not like that of Jephthah’s daughter, a free-will offering to the Lord.  Pride, and policy, and disappointment, and, it may be, hopeless, self-condemned affection,