Half of our life is spent in vain regrets.  When we are boys we ardently wish to be men; when men we wish as ardently to be boys.  We sing sad songs of the lapse of time.  We talk of “auld lang syne,” of the days when we were young, of gathering shells on the sea-shore and throwing them carelessly away.  We never cease to be sentimental upon past youth and lost manhood and beauty.  Yet there are no regrets so false, and few half so silly.  Perhaps the saddest sight in the world is to see an old lady, wrinkled and withered, dressing, talking, and acting like a very young one, and forgetting all the time, as she clings to the feeble remnant of the past, that there is no sham so transparent as her own, and that people, instead of feeling with her, are laughing at her.  Old boys disguise their foibles a little better; but they are equally ridiculous.  The feeble protests which they make against the flying chariot of Time are equally futile.  The great Mower enters the field, and all must come down.  To stay him would be impossible; We might as well try with a finger to stop Ixion’s wheel, or to dam up the current of the Thames with a child’s foot.

Since the matter is inevitable, we may as well sit down and reason it out.  Is it so dreadful to grow old?  Does old age need its apologies and its defenders?  Is it a benefit or a calamity?  Why should it be odious and ridiculous?  An old tree is picturesque, an old castle venerable, an old cathedral inspires awe—­why should man be worse than his works?

Let us, in the first place, see what youth is.  Is it so blessed and happy and flourishing as it seems to us?  Schoolboys do not think so.  They always wish to be older.  You cannot insult one of them more than by telling him that he is a year or two younger than he is.  He fires up at once:  “Twelve, did you say, sir?  No, I’m fourteen.”  But men and women who have reached twenty-eight do not thus add to their years.  Amongst schoolboys, notwithstanding the general tenor of those romancists who see that every thing young bears a rose-colored blush, misery is prevalent enough.  Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, were each and all unhappy boys.  They all had their rebuffs, and bitter, bitter troubles; all the more bitter because their sensitiveness was so acute.  Suicide is not unknown amongst the young; fears prey upon them and terrify them; ignorances and follies surround them.  Arriving at manhood, we are little better off.  If we are poor, we mark the difference between the rich and us; we see position gains all the day.  If we are as clever as Hamlet, we grow just as philosophically disappointed.  If we love, we can only be sure of a brief pleasure—­an April day.  Love has its bitterness.  “It is,” says Ovid, an adept in the matter, “full of anxious fear.”  We fret and fume at the authority of the wise heads; we have an intense idea of our own talent.  We believe calves of our own age to be as big and as valuable as full-grown bulls; we envy whilst we jest at the old.  We cry, with the puffed-up hero of the Patrician’s Daughter: