N.—­Parr was a mischievous old fellow:  he has left a pernicious example of longevity behind him.  At sixty-nine a man will look with complacency to the approaching termination of his career, as an event to be expected in the ordinary course of Nature.  Once allow him to turn seventy, he has then escaped the fatal three-score-and-ten, and would consider himself an ill-used person should he receive notice of ejectment a day short of ninety.  Ninety comes, and he grows insolent.  Death, he thinks, has passed on and overlooked him.  He asks why Nature so long has delayed to claim her debt.  She has suffered thrice seven years to elapse beyond the period usually assigned for payment, and he indulges in wild fancies of a Statute of Limitations.  In his most rational moments he talks of nothing but Old Parr.  He burns his will, marries his housemaid, hectors his son-and-heir, who is seventy, and canes his grand-child (a lad of fifty) for keeping late hours.  I called on old S—­g a morning or two ago:  he is ninety-three.  I found him reading his newspaper, and inveighing against the outcry for Reform and short Parliaments—­declaring that, rather than be forced down into Cheshire to vote oftener than once in every six or seven years, he, for his part, would sell his franchise for a straw.  ’Twas clear he had outlived the recollection of the probability of a visit from one who might deprive him of his franchise upon terms even less advantageous.  I took occasion to compliment him upon his fine old age.  His reply was an angry growl.—­“Ugh! do you want me gone?  I’m only ninety-three Ugh!  Mr. Parr wouldn’t die till he was one hundred and sixty!”

R.—­Paying a visit to old P—­ke, I found him walking up and down the drawing-room, stamping and raving, and holding a handkerchief to his mouth.  I inquired what ailed him.  To my astonishment, he complained of tooth-ache!—­a strange complaint, thought I, for a man of seventy-eight, whom one would hardly expect to find with a single implement of that kind in his head; but, in fact, he was in possession of the whole set, except two!  His lamentation, which he continued at intervals, ran in this strain—­“Seventy-eight!—­only seventy-eight, and two teeth gone already!—­lost one of them sixty years ago, and, as if that were not enough, four years ago I must lose a second;—­and now—­ah!  I suppose I must part with another.  And then my eyes! one of my eyes is beginning to fail.  Lord help me! for, should it go on at this rate, I shall be in a sad condition before many more years are over my head!”

S.—­The unconscionable old rogue! at seventy-eight how many more could he expect?

N.—­Rely on it I am right, and that Parr was to blame for this.  At seventy, P—­ke would have died with grateful thanksgivings on his lips for the blessings of his past life.  As it was, had he been allowed to live on till he should have parted with the remainder of his teeth, at the rate of one a year, he would have attempted, when it came to the last, to smuggle a false tooth or two into his jaws.