dum-book for 1775.-I can turn over the leaves between that time and this (said I to myself) in a moment—thus !—aud, casting my eye on the blank paper that remained, began to meditate on the decline of life, on the enjoyments, the comforts, the cares, and the sorrows of age.

Of domestic comforts, I could not help reflecting how much celibacy deprives us; how many pleasures are derived from a family, when that family is happy in itself, is dutiful, affectionate, good-humoured, virtyous. I cannot easily account for the omission of Cicero, who, in his treatise de Senectute,' enumerates the various enjoyments of old age, without once mentioning those which arise from the possession of worthy and promising children. Perhaps the Roman manners and customs were not very much calculated to promote this: they who could adopt the children of others, were not likely to be so exclusively attached to their own, or to feel from that attachment a very high degree of pleasure; or it may be, the father of Marcus felt something on the subject of children, of which he was willing to spare himself the recollection. But though a bachelor myself, I look with equal veneration and complacency on the domestic blessings of a good old man, surrounded by a virtuous and flourishing race, in whom he lives over the best days of his youth, and from whose happiness he draws so much matter for his own. Tis at that advanced period of life that most of the enjoyments of a bachelor begin to leave him, that he feels the solitariness of his situation, linked to no surrounding objects, but those from which the debility or the seriousness of age must necessarily divorce him. The club, the coffee-house, and the tavern, will make but a few short inquiries after his absence, and weakness or disease may imprison him to his home, without their much feeling the want of his

company, or any of their members soothing his uneasiness with theirs. The endearing society, the tender attentions of a man's own children, give to his very wants and weakness a sort of enjoyment, when those wants are supplied, and that weakness aided, by the hands he loves.

Though the celibacy of the female sex is still more reproached, and is thought more comfortless than that of ours, yet I confess it seems to me to possess several advantages of which the other is deprived.An old maid has been more accustomed to home and to solitude than an old bachelor, and can employ herself in many little female occupations which render her more independent of society for the disposal of her time and the amusement of her mind. The comparatively unimportant employments of the female world, which require neither much vigour of body, nor much exertion of soul, occupy her hours and her attention, and prevent that impatience of idleness or of inactivity, which so often preys on men who have been formerly busy or active. The negative and gentler virtues which characterise female worth, suit themselves more easily to the languid and suffering state of age or infirmity, than those active and spirit-stirring qualities which fre quently constitute the excellence of the male chaThere are, no doubt, some females to whom this will not apply; to whom age must be more terrible than to any other being, because it deprives them of more. She whose only endowment was beauty, must tremble at the approach of those wrinkles which spoil her of her all; she to whom youthful amusements and gaieties were the whole of life, must dread more than death that period when they can be no longer enjoyed.

racter.

It need scarce be suggested, that, to lessen the evils, and increase the comforts of age in either sex,

135 the surest means are to be found in the cultivation and improvement of the mind in youth to have something, as it were, in bank, on which to subsist the mind when the sources of external supply are cut off; to allow it some room for its natural activity when external employments have ceased; to preserve that energy of soul without which life is not only useless but burdensome. The former exercise of the imagination creates numberless pleasures, and its former soundness prevents numberless evils, to an old man. In proportion to the excellence of those objects over which it has formerly ranged, the review of age will be delighted or dreary, will call up elegant or gross, comfortable or distressing, elevating or humiliating, remembrances.

When I say, that of this better-cultivated old age the remembrances will be more delightful, I do not mean that they will be always more gay. Of melancholy remembrances this state will naturally be more susceptible, than those in which memory has less store, and active employment tends more to dissipate thought. But who would exchange melancholy remembrances for the apathy of him who thinks only of the present? Who would exchange, for unfeeling contentment, that creative memory which peoples the present time with past joys, past friendships, past love, though the recollection carries sadness along with it? The most melancholy of all reflections which an old man can make, when he looks around him, and misses the companions of his youth, the associates of his active days, and exclaims, in the natural language of Petrarch, Ed Io pur vivo!'-even in this, to one of a good and pious mind, there is a certain elevation above the world, that sheds (so to speak) a beam of heavenly light upon the darkness around him.

N° 72. A late correspondent, under the signature of Atticus, pleases and interests me much, by a natural, though it is not a new description of the various occupations and feelings of his old age. After mentioning the chequered nature of his past life, on the dark side of which he places the loss of an excellent wife, and several promising children, the memory of those dear objects,' says he, and the soothing hope that we shall soon meet again, is now the source of extreme pleasure to me. In my retired walks in the country, I am never alone; those dear shades are my constant companions.' Shenstone,

with a felicity which perhaps our language could not have afforded him, has expressed this feeling in eight or nine words, to the force and tenderness of which I believe no other words could add. 'Tis in the inscription on Miss Dolman's urn, Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse !"

In recollecting those whom time has swept from our remembrance, there are some characters whom, though we less respected, and, reasonably speaking, must less regret, we yet cannot help remembering with a feeling, if not so tender, perhaps fully as sympathetic, as the loss of much more dignified personages might produce.-'Alas, poor Yorick !'

Even in what I have passed of life, I recal at this moment the jests, the sallies, the thoughtless gaiety, of several such characters, with whom one cannot easily connect an idea so serious as that of death, whom I still wonder at not meeting in the accustomed haunts of their amusement, and cannot, without violence to my imagination, think of as gone for

ever.

The regrets of the old for such companions may be the easier allowed, from the circumstance of their time of life preventing them from the acquisition of any such again. But though nothing less becomes

an old man than the levity of youthful society and youthful amusements, yet to keep up such an interest in them as may preserve to himself the complaceney of the young, and a certain enjoyment of their happiness, is one of the great ingredients of a happy old age. I smiled one day at seeing my friend Colonel Caustic busied in fitting up a fishing-rod for a school-boy, the son of a neighbouring gentleman, who wished to go an-angling on the stream that runs through the grounds. You think me very foolishly employed,' said the Colonel; but do not blame me, till your philosophy can shew a happier face of its making than my friend Billy's there.

Some old men forget that they are old, and some that they ever were young; the first are ridiculous in the imitation, the latter peevish in the restraint of youthful gaiety. This is, generally, the effect neither of good-nature in the one, or of wisdom in the other; but results, in the first, from a foolish vanity, and from an incapacity of those better employments and pleasures which suit their age; in the latter, from a splenetic regret of their incapacity for those employments and pleasures which suit it not.

Very different from this peevish intolerance of youth, is that sort of gentle dissatisfaction with the present time, which some of the best tempered old men are inclined to shew. As a young man, I never complained of this partiality which my seniors discovered for their own times, or the injustice they. sometimes did to the present. 'Tis on the warmest and worthiest hearts that the impression of the former age remains the deepest. The Prisci conscius avi, is one whom his coevals loved, and whom his juniors, whom he sometimes under-rates, should regard; as he who is warmest in the cause of his absent friend, is the man whose friendship we should be most solicitous to gain. Perhaps it may be accounted a sort of proof of