the most luxurious and comfort-loving old wretch, his great text was the value of Spartan discipline for everyone else.  If any dish was not exactly to his mind, he would allow no one to taste it, send it away, and complain bitterly that even his simple wants could not be supplied.  Even when he got more infirm and took most of his food in seclusion, he ordered the meals for the rest of the household; he could not bear to think of their having anything to eat of which he did not himself approve.  He used to make everyone go to bed before him, and would even look into their rooms to see that they were not reading in bed.  It was all so virtuous and sensible that it was impossible to argue with him, and I used to suffer from an insane desire to pull his chair away from under him while he sate lecturing the company about the way to attain old age.  Here, too, it was impossible to see the purpose with which the unhappy old man was being encouraged by nature and destiny to this hideous and tyrannical self-deception, this ruthless piling up of the materials for disillusionment in a higher sphere.  It seemed as if he were being by his very vigour and virtue deliberately trained for ineradicable conceit and complacency.  If his relations came to see him, they were lectured on their inefficiency; if they stayed away, they were reproached for their want of natural affection.  It seemed absolutely impossible to bring any conception home to him, wrapped as he was in armour of impenetrable self-satisfaction.

But the old friend of whom I spoke is entirely removed from either of these shadows of age.  He is infirm, but not ill; he is infinitely courteous and gracious, grateful for the smallest kindness, determined not to interfere with anyone’s convenience.  My servants simply adore him, welcome him like an angel, and see him depart with tears.  He knows all about them, and keeps all the details of their families in his mind.  He never talks of himself, but has a perfectly genuine and unaffected interest in other people.  He is endlessly tolerant and sweet-tempered; and sometimes will drop a little sweet and mellow maxim, the ripest fruit of sunny experience.  One feels in his presence that this is what life is meant to do for us all, if it were not for the strange admixture of irritabilities and selfishnesses, so natural and yet so ugly, which lie in wait for so many of us.  One of the most beautiful things about him is his tenderness.  He talks of his old friends who have taken their departure before him with a perfect simplicity, while I have seen the tears gather and suddenly overbrim his eyes.  He seems to have no personal regrets or hopes; but to have transferred them all to other people.  Yet he does not keep his friends in mind in a professional way as a matter of duty; his thoughts are simply full of them.  He does no work, writes few letters, reads a little; he sometimes smilingly accuses himself of being lazy; and yet his presence and his unconscious sweetness are the most powerful