is not entirely to be depended upon.  You should hear the doctors at my Inn (in the intervals of their abuse of their professional brethren) discourse upon this topic—­on that overdose of chloral which poor B. took, and on that injudicious self-application of chloroform which carried off poor C. With the law in such a barbarous state in relation to self-destruction, and taking into account the feelings of relatives, there was, of course, only one way of wording the certificate, but—­and then they shake their heads as only doctors can, and help themselves to port, though they know it is poison to them.

It is an old joke that annuitants live for ever, but no annuity ever had the effect of prolonging life which the present assurance companies have.  How many a time, I wonder, in these later years, has a hand been stayed, with a pistol or ‘a cup of cold poison’ in it, by the thought, ’If I do this, my family will lose the money I am insured for, besides the premiums.’  This feeling is altogether different from that which causes Jeannette and Jeannot in their Paris attic to light their charcoal fire, stop up the chinks with their love-letters, and die (very disreputably) ’clasped in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace.’  There is not one halfpenny’s worth of sentiment about it in the Englishman’s case, nor are any such thoughts bred in his brain while youth is in him.  It is in our midway days, with old age touching us here and there, as autumn ‘lays its fiery finger on the leaves’ and withers them, that we first think of it.  When the weight of anxiety and care is growing on us, while the shoulders are becoming bowed (not in resignation, but in weakness) which have to bear it; when our pains are more and more constant, our pleasures few and fading, and when whatever happens, we know, must needs be for the worse—­then it is that the praise of the silver hair and length of days becomes a mockery indeed.

Was it the prescience of such a state of thought, I wonder (for it certainly did not exist in their time), that caused good men of old to extol old age; as though anything could reconcile the mind of man to the time when the very sun is darkened to him, and ’the clouds return after the rain?’ There is a noble passage in ‘Hyperion’ which has always seemed to me to repeat that sentiment in Ecclesiastes; it speaks of an expression in a man’s face: 

    ’As though the vanward clouds of evil days
    Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
    Was with its storied thunder labouring up.’

This is why poor Paterfamilias, sitting in the family pew, is not so enamoured of that idea of accomplishing those threescore years and ten which the young parson, fresh from Cambridge, is describing as such a lucky number in life’s lottery.  The attempt to paint it so is well-meaning, no doubt, ’the vacant chaff well meant for grain;’ and it is touching to see how men generally (knowing