As a general thing, I would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he is himself an author, over fifty years of age.  At thirty, we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this tenement of life; twenty years later, we have carved it, or shut up our jackknives.  Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any, because nobody’s elbows are in our way.  So I am glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few years.

Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere.  I just now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo.  Do you know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children?  I have heard it said, but I can not be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age.  An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind, used to love to hear little nursery stories read over and over to him.  One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor.  I remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way of coming to maturity.  Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over.  Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit.  And some, that, like the Winter Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards.  Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm—­eaten windfalls.  Milton was a Saint Germain with a graft of the roseate Early Catherine.  Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet-skinned old Chaucer was an Easter Beurre’; the buds of a new summer were swelling when he ripened.

—­Holmes.

Notes.—­The above selection is from the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”

Lochiel.  See note on page 214.

The Duke of Wellington (b. 1769, d. 1852) was the most celebrated of
English generals.  He won great renown in India and in the “Peninsular
War,” and commanded the allied forces when Napoleon was defeated at
Waterloo.

Easter Beurre’, Saint Germain, Winter Nelis, Early Catherine and
Jargonelles are the names of certain varieties of pears.

Milton.  See biographical notice on page 312.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (b. 1328, d. 1400). is often called “The Father of English Poetry.”  He was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey.  He was a prolific writer, but his “Canterbury Tales” is by far the best known of his works.