in courts of justice, and historical societies.  Age is becoming in the country.  But in the rush and uproar of Broadway, if you look into the faces of the passengers, there is dejection or indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury, and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it.  Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant.  We do not count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count.  The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus.  In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous.  Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.

This is odious on the face of it.  Universal convictions are not to be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their cheeks.  We know the value of experience.  Life and art are cumulative; and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to be heard on that subject.  A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men should be held eligible who were under seventy.  But in all governments, the councils of power were held by the old; and patricians or patres, senate or senes, seigneurs or seniors, gerousia, the senate of Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply old men.

This cynical lampoon is refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by all history.  We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace, by which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare exceptions.  Nature, in the main, vindicates her law.  Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.  And if the life be true and noble, we have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old,—­namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey them:  as at “My Cid, with the fleecy beard,” in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven.  We still feel the force of Socrates, “whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men”; of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself better