Not without a sense of exultation has the literary character felt this peculiar happiness, in the unbroken chain of his habits and his feelings.  HOBBES exulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was still the same Hobbes; and to demonstrate the reality of this existence, published, in the eighty-seventh year of his age, his version of the Odyssey, and the following year his Iliad.  Of the happy results of literary habits in advanced life, the Count DE TRESSAN, the elegant abridger of the old French romances, in his “Literary Advice to his Children” has drawn a most pleasing picture.  With a taste for study, which he found rather inconvenient in the moveable existence of a man of the world, and a military wanderer, he had, however, contrived to reserve an hour or two every day for literary pursuits.  The men of science, with whom he had chiefly associated, appear to have turned his passion to observation and knowledge rather than towards imagination and feeling; the combination formed a wreath for his grey hairs.  When Count De Tressan retired from a brilliant to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he pursued his literary tastes with the vivacity of a young author inspired by the illusion of fame.  At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recomposed his old Chivalric Romances, and his reanimated fancy struck fire in the veins of the old man.  Among the first designs of his retirement was a singular philosophical legacy for his children.  It was a view of the history and progress of the human mind—­of its principles, its errors, and its advantages, as these were reflected in himself; in the dawnings of his taste, and the secret inclinations of his mind, which the men of genius of the age with whom he associated had developed.  Expatiating on their memory, he calls on his children to witness the happiness of study, so evident in those pleasures which were soothing and adorning his old age.  “Without knowledge, without literature,” exclaims the venerable enthusiast, “in whatever rank we are born, we can only resemble the vulgar.”  To the centenary FONTENELLE the Count DE TRESSAN was chiefly indebted for the happy life he derived from the cultivation of literature; and when this man of a hundred years died, TRESSAN, himself on the borders of the grave, would offer the last fruits of his mind in an eloge to his ancient master.  It was the voice of the dying to the dead, a last moment of the love and sensibility of genius, which feeble life could not extinguish.  The genius of CICERO, inspired by the love of literature, has thrown something delightful over this latest season of life, in his de Senectute.  To have written on old age, in old age, is to have obtained a triumph over Time.[A]

[Footnote A:  “Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age,” by the late Sir Thomas Bernard, was written a year or two before he died.]