“That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”

The sleep referred to being death.  This was meant to take away the reader’s breath; and after performing the feat, Byron betook himself to his pillow with a sense of supreme cleverness.  Contrast with this Shakspeare’s far out-looking and thought-heavy lines—­lines which, under the same image, represent death—­

         “To die—­to sleep;—­
  To sleep! perchance to dream;—­ay, there’s the rub: 
  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come!”

And you see at once how a man’s notions of death and dying are deepened by a wider experience.  Middle age may fear death quite as little as youth fears it; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no heart to poke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond names like a lover, or to stick a primrose in its grinning chaps, and draw a strange pleasure from the irrelevancy.

The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as if he had come out of a great battle.  Comrade after comrade has fallen; his own life seems to have been charmed.  And knowing how it fared with his friends—­perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds drawn down, silence in the house, blubbered faces of widow and orphans, intimation of the event in the newspapers, with a request that friends will accept of it, the day after—­a man, as he draws near middle age, begins to suspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught in a shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he anxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to the colour of his tongue.  In early life illness is a luxury, and draws out toward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are felt to be a full over-payment of pain and weakness; then there is the pleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a core and marrow of delight in meats, drinks, sleep, silence; the bunch of newly-plucked flowers on the table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearance of nurses and friends.  Later in life, when one occupies a post, and is in discharge of duties which are accumulating against recovery, illness and convalescence cease to be luxuries.  Illness is felt to be a cruel interruption of the ordinary course of things, and the sick person is harassed by a sense of the loss of time and the loss of strength.  He is placed hors de combat; all the while he is conscious that the battle is going on around him, and he feels his temporary withdrawal a misfortune.  Of course, unless a man is very unhappily circumstanced, he has in his later illnesses all the love, patience, and attention which sweetened his earlier ones; but then he cannot rest in them, and accept them as before as compensation in full.  The world is ever with him; through his interests and his affections he has meshed himself in an intricate net-work of relationships and other dependences, and a fatal issue—­which in such cases is ever