Some English sporting characters have furnished striking examples of robust longevity.  In Gilpin’s “Forest Scenery” there is the story of one of these horseback heroes.  Henry Hastings was the name of this old gentleman, who lived in the time of Charles the First.  It would be hard to find a better portrait of a hunting squire than that which the Earl of Shaftesbury has the credit of having drawn of this very peculiar personage.  His description ends by saying, “He lived to be an hundred, and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles.  He got on horseback without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past fourscore.”

Everything depends on habit.  Old people can do, of course, more or less well, what they have been doing all their lives; but try to teach them any new tricks, and the truth of the old adage will very soon show itself.  Mr. Henry Hastings had done nothing but hunt all his days, and his record would seem to have been a good deal like that of Philippus Zaehdarm in that untranslatable epitaph which may be found in “Sartor Resartus.”  Judged by its products, it was a very short life of a hundred useless twelve months.

It is something to have climbed the white summit, the Mont Blanc of fourscore.  A small number only of mankind ever see their eightieth anniversary.  I might go to the statistical tables of the annuity and life insurance offices for extended and exact information, but I prefer to take the facts which have impressed themselves upon me in my own career.

The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I am a member, graduated, according to the triennial, fifty-nine in number.  It is sixty years, then, since that time; and as they were, on an average, about twenty years old, those who survive must have reached fourscore years.  Of the fifty-nine graduates ten only are living, or were at the last accounts; one in six, very nearly.  In the first ten years after graduation, our third decade, when we were between twenty and thirty years old, we lost three members,—­about one in twenty; between the ages of thirty and forty, eight died,—­one in seven of those the decade began with; from forty to fifty, only two,—­or one in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty, eight,—­or one in six; from sixty to seventy, fifteen,—­or two out of every five; from seventy to eighty, twelve,—­or one in two.  The greatly increased mortality which began with our seventh decade went on steadily increasing.  At sixty we come “within range of the rifle-pits,” to borrow an expression from my friend Weir Mitchell.

Our eminent classmate, the late Professor Benjamin Peirce, showed by numerical comparison that the men of superior ability outlasted the average of their fellow-graduates.  He himself lived a little beyond his threescore and ten years.  James Freeman Clarke almost reached the age of eighty.  The eighth decade brought the fatal year for Benjamin Robbins Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges