than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, “The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever made,—­an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him”; of Newton, who made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years; of Bacon, who “took all knowledge to be his province”; of Fontenelle, “that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years”; of Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopaedia of science.

Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily count particular benefits of that condition.  It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear.  The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home.  It were strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped.  When the old wife says, “Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,”—­he replies, “What if it is?” The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his knee threatens mortification.  When the pleuro-pneumonia of the cows raged, the butchers said, that, though the acute degree was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur among cattle.  All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent, and we die without developing them:  such is the affirmative force of the constitution.  But if you are enfeebled by any cause, the disease becomes strong.  At every stage we lose a foe.  At fifty years, ’t is said, afflicted citizens lose their sick-headaches.  I hope this hegira is not as movable a feast as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me that the rose-bugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July:  they stay a fortnight later in mine.  But be it as it may with the sick-headache,—­’t is certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are lulled, once for all, as we come up with certain goals of time.  The passions have answered their purpose:  that slight, but dread overweight, with which, in each instance, Nature secures the execution of her aim, drops off.  To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror of death.  To perfect the commisariat, she implants in each a little rapacity to get the supply, and a little over-supply, of his wants.  To insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct, at the risk of disorder,