On the last anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with peculiar demonstrations of respect.  He replied to these compliments in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and, aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary on Cicero’s chapter “De Senectute.”  The character of the speaker, the transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the naivete of his eager preference of Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave unusual interest to the College festival.  It was a discourse full of dignity, honoring him who spoke and those who heard.

The speech led me to look over at home—­an easy task—­Cicero’s famous essay, charming by its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical precepts; with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest, perhaps, in his praise of life on the farm; and rising, at the conclusion, to a lofty strain.  But he does not exhaust the subject; rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our broader modern life.

Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element of time, and in which Nature delights.  Wellington, in speaking of military men, said,—­“What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards!  When our journal is published, many statues must come down.”  I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded pelisse, wig and spectacles, and padded chair of Age.  Nature lends herself to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy hair, short memory, and sleep.  These also are masks, and all is not Age that wears them.  Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and all our mates are yet youths and boyish, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does not less deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with a most amusing respect:  and this lets us into the secret, that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors.  Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.

For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous:  and the essence of age is intellect.  Wherever that appears, we call it old.  If we look into the eyes of the youngest person, we sometimes discover that here is one who knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him; there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him:  which fact the Indian Vedas express, when they say, “He that can discriminate is the father of his father.”  And in our old British legends of Arthur and the Round-Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, he speaks to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the by-standers.  Wherever there is power, there is age.  Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls.  I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.