CHAPTER XXII.

Literary old age still learning.—­Influence of late studies in life.—­ Occupations in advanced age of the literary character.—­Of literary men who have died at their studies.

The old age of the literary character retains its enjoyments, and usually its powers—­a happiness which accompanies no other.  The old age of coquetry witnesses its own extinct beauty; that of the “used” idler is left without a sensation; that of the grasping Croesus exists only to envy his heir; and that of the Machiavel who has no longer a voice in the cabinet, is but an unhappy spirit lingering to find its grave:  but for the aged man of letters memory returns to her stores, and imagination is still on the wing amidst fresh discoveries and new designs.  The others fall like dry leaves, but he drops like ripe fruit, and is valued when no longer on the tree.

The constitutional melancholy of JOHNSON often tinged his views of human life.  When he asserted that “no man adds much to his stock of knowledge, or improves much after forty,” his theory was overturned by his own experience; for his most interesting works were the productions of a very late period of life, formed out of the fresh knowledge with which he had then furnished himself.

The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age.  The curious mind is still striking out into new pursuits, and the mind of genius is still creating.  ANCORA IMPARO!—­“Even yet I am learning!” was the concise inscription on an ingenious device of an old man placed in a child’s go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, which, it is said, Michael Angelo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth year.  Painters have improved even to extreme old age:  West’s last works were his best, and Titian was greatest on the verge of his century.  Poussin was delighted with the discovery of this circumstance in the lives of painters.  “As I grow older, I feel the desire of surpassing myself.”  And it was in the last years of his life, that with the finest poetical invention, he painted the allegorical pictures of the Seasons.  A man of letters in his sixtieth year once told me, “It is but of late years that I have learnt the right use of books and the art of reading.”

Time, the great destroyer of other men’s happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.  A learned and highly intellectual friend once said to me, “If I have acquired more knowledge these last four years than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to my stores in the next four years; and so at every subsequent period of my life, should I acquire only in the same proportion, the general mass of my knowledge will greatly accumulate.  If we are not deprived by nature or misfortune of the means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fully occupied and deeply interested