even to the last day of our earthly term.”  Such is the delightful thought of Owen Feltham; “If I die to-morrow, my life will be somewhat the sweeter to-day for knowledge.”  The perfectibility of the human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Stael, consists in the mass of our ideas, to which every age will now add, by means unknown to preceding generations.  Imagination was born at once perfect, and her arts find a term to their progress; but there is no boundary to knowledge nor the discovery of thought.

How beautiful in the old age of the literary character was the plan which a friend of mine pursued!  His mind, like a mirror whose quicksilver had not decayed, reflected all objects to the last.  Pull of learned studies and versatile curiosity, he annually projected a summer-tour on the Continent to some remarkable spot.  The local associations were an unfailing source of agreeable impressions to a mind so well prepared, and he presented his friends with a “Voyage Litteraire,” as a new-year’s gift.  In such pursuits, where life is “rather wearing out than rusting out,” as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, scarcely shall we feel those continued menaces of death which shake the old age of men of no intellectual pursuits, who are dying so many years.

Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, constitute the happiness of literary men.  The study of the arts and literature spreads a sunshine over the winter of their days.  In the solitude and the night of human life, they discover that unregarded kindness of nature, which has given flowers that only open in the evening, and only bloom through the night-season.  NECKER perceived the influence of late studies in life; for he tells us, that “the era of threescore and ten is an agreeable age for writing; your mind has not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you in peace.”

The opening of one of LA MOTHE LE VAYER’S Treatises is striking:  “I should but ill return the favours God has granted me in the eightieth year of my age, should I allow myself to give way to that shameless want of occupation which all my life I have condemned;” and the old man proceeds with his “Observations on the Composition and Reading of Books.”  “If man be a bubble of air, it is then time that I should hasten my task; for my eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage together ere I leave the world,” wrote VARBO, in opening his curious treatise de Re Rustica, which the sage lived to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand years, the world possesses.  “My works are many, and I am old; yet I still can fatigue and tire myself with writing more.” says PETRARCH in his “Epistle to Posterity.”  The literary character has been fully occupied in the eightieth and the ninetieth year of life.  ISAAC WALTON still glowed while writing some of the most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth year, and in the ninetieth enriched the poetical world with the first publication of a romantic tale by Chalkhill, “the friend of Spenser.”  BODMER, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, and WIELAND on Cicero’s Letters.[A]