OLD AGE. "My age is as a lusty winter,-frosty but kindly.” As you Like it. WITH the exception of a few reprobates and freethinkers, every body wishes to go to Heaven; but the most enthusiastic of us all, if he had the choice, would consent to go there as late as possible. This perverse disposition to extend life beyond that period in which the faculties begin to decay, like that of children, who, having eaten the apple, apply themselves voraciously to devour the parings, is any thing but rational yet so it is, we cling with closer earnestness to the rickety tenement, as its dilapidations increase; and are never so anxious for a renewal of the lease as at the very moment when the edifice is crumbling about our ears. : The Abbé Morellet was wont to declare, that in spite of his overwhelming infirmities he still clung to life, in the hopes of seeing how the French revolution would end: and it seems not unreasonable to attribute the love of long life very generally to a principle of curiosity. Men are always more or less involved in some series of events which it is disagreeable to leave unfinished. One man would be glad to know how his children will turn out; another has begun a plantation; a third desires to arrive at the end of a political intrigue; a fourth longs to witness how his neighbour will cut up; and a fifth (the most unreasonable of all) would see the end of a Chancery suit; and so we go on with time" in its petty space from day to day." We see this disposition in individuals to pry into a futurity in whose combinations they have no part, instanced in their thousand minute directions concerning the disposition of their own funerals, in the petty details of direction which accompany the testamentary disposition of property; and even the indirect admonitions of sexagenary fathers given in the shape of predictions,-the "Tom, Tom, when I'm gone I suppose you'll carry my trees to Newmarket," and the "I see how it will be when I'm out of the way," betray full as much of idle speculation, as of paternal anxiety. If we except the old fellow of a college, who would do nothing for posterity, because posterity had done nothing for him, it would be hard to find an individual, who really entertained no curiosity to know how the world could possibly go on, when deprived of his own co-operation and support. The desire of long life, abstracted from some such consideration, is the more absurd, because, when "the inevitable hour" arrives, the longest and the shortest life are in the imagination equal. However wearisome existence may have been in the acting, in retrospect it never appears long; and with the oldest, no less than the youngest, " enough" in this, as in many other cases, signifies pretty generally "a little more." Louis the Second of Hungary, we are told*, ran through a long career, within the short compass of a very few years. He was born so long before the ordinary completion of gestation, that he came into the world without the decent covering of a skin. In his second year he Huseland on Animal Life. was crowned; in his third he succeeded to the throne; in his fourteenth he had a complete beard; in his fifteenth (comme de raison) he married; in his eighteenth he grew grey; and in his twentieth he died, if not full of years, at least at "a good old age," and was gathered to his fathers. This precocity, so rare in the northern climates, is to a certain degree common among the females of warmer regions, who are grandmothers at six and twenty*; yet we do not find these individuals a whit more apt to complain of the brevity of their allotted space, than the Nestors of our species. But whatever may be the causes of our reluctance to shake off the fardels of this world, the effect is constant ; and there is no subject, which excites a more universal interest than this of longevity. Even the warmest partizans of that jovial doctrine," a short life and a merry one," would willingly convert it into a long life and a merry one: and the very judges on the bench, those "sage, grave men," who send others on the great voyage of discovery with so much sang-froid, never lose the opportunity of examining a very aged witness, without interrupting the proceedings, to inquire his mode of life; as if my lord" himself had not long ago formed his own habits; and as if time were yet left for a new course of training to qualify for a second century. On the subject of attaining to old age, almost every one has a theory of his own, and backs it out with a sufficiency of apposite examples:water-drinkers, wine-drinkers, ale-drinkers, and brandy-drinkers, meatconsumers, and Hindoos, have all furnished instances of protracted life; tea and no tea, much sleep and little sleep, have each carried their heroes far into the vale of years; fox-hunters and book-worms have alike contrived occasionally to put off the payment of the debt of nature to the latest moment; and town and city, pole and equator, can each boast of their Parrs and their Jenkinses: nay, there are not wanting persons who have contrived to preserve the balance between their radical heat and their radical moisture by the use of that "noxious and pestilente weed" tobacco. In all these various and opposing theories, it should seem that the judgment, as in other cases, is under the dominion of the passions; and that men recommend as wholesome, those practices which they themselves find the most agreeable, by an easy mistake, confounding their own powers of resistance with the virtues of their favourite system. Thus, one old drunkard shuts the eyes of a sot to the premature and painful deaths of all his companions; and a certain indolent epicurean has been frequently heard to ask with an air of great seriousness, when pressed to take exercise, if a post-chaise was much improved by a journey of some hundred miles over a rough road? The human machine is of so pliant and accommodating a nature, that, with the exception of gross intemperance and abuse of powers, it readily adapts itself to the variety of impressions which accident and habit engender. Although therefore disease may be repaired, and shocks too violent for a tender frame be avoided by care, and though life may thus be protracted beyond what the constitution promises, yet it seems most probable that instances of great longevity depend far * Letters written during a ten years residence at the Court of Tripoli. + Sir J. Sinclair, Code of Longevity. more upon original conformation, than on peculiarity of self-management. This much may, however, be safely asserted, that no one ever succeeded in living long, by taking too much pains to effect his purpose. If care will fret and wear away the nine threads which form the whip-cord destiny of a cat, how much more likely is it to snap the single and tender filament which is spun for man! Nothing therefore can be more absurd than the hypochondriacal practices of those who lay themselves under all sorts of minute restrictions for the preservation of their frame, as if the whole business of life were to avoid death. This is indeed to have a slavish fear of destruction, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. The persons on record, as having passed the ordinary term of existence, have generally been among the lower classes, and consequently removed from the possibility of too much circumspection in this particular. The French, too, who afford among their celebrated characters many instances of the much more valuable property of health and vigour of mind protracted to the eightieth and even ninetieth year, are a peculiarly cheerful and even thoughtless race. Of all the circumstances over which man holds control, perhaps the most influential on longevity is the absence of mental anxiety; and yet this is precisely the condition excluded by too close an observance of codes of health. Whatever good may therefore be expected from consulting the Cheynes and the Cornaros, must be more than counterbalanced by the evil of constant solicitude; even if the end were worthy of the means, and if the outliving of ourselves, and what is still worse-our friends and connexions, were not a calamity which a rational being should seek to avoid. But a truce with sententious morality, to which we have been led involuntarily, for no assignable reason, if it be not punning Tom Ashe's,* that death is a grave theme. The proper object of the present paper is to afford one more instance of a life protracted beyond the common term, contrary to the chances, and under circumstances which, à priori, would not have been favourable to extraordinary longevity. Standing, one morning in May," (as the ballad has it) at the door of the neat village inn which opens its hospitable gates at the very base of Mount Cenis, and at the extremity of the town of Lans-leburg, I was wrapped in the pleasing contemplation of one of those storms of wind and snow, which, "in season and out of season," are to be met with in these elevated regions. The questions which naturally suggest themselves to a traveller about to undertake a novel journey under such circumstances, engaged a conversation with the by-standers concerning tourmentes, avalanches, &c. interspersed with divers narrations of persons lost in the snow. On the mention of one 66 of these adventures," Ay," said a hale, hearty, old woman, who was among the group, "I rode courier on that occasion, and narrowly escaped being lost myself."-" Courier!" I replied, in an accent sufficiently indicative of surprise to engage the person to whom I had been speaking in the desired explanation. "Yes, Sir," he continued, "she says true;-that is La donna di centro quattr' anni,† who long kept the inn of this town, and who spent a large part of her life in men's clothes as a courier." *Swift's Works. The lady of 104 years. The uncommon vigour of her appearance induced me to hint my suspicions that her age was not so advanced as she pretended-suspi- · cions which she received evidently more as a compliment than a reproach; but upon farther inquiry I learned that her story was literally true: she having been born on the 17th of November, 1714. She was the daughter of Claude and Elizabeth Thomas, little farmers, whose situation in the world was by no means such as to exempt her from its roughest rubs. It is somewhat singular that she has a sister still (1819) living, aged 98, and who promises to rival herself in the pertinacity with which she sticks to life. To encounter "fortune's buffets," she brought into the field a strong muscular frame, a heart little troubled with the tender susceptibilities of sex, and a disposition to gaiety and cheerfulness which was not to be disturbed. For the first thirty-eight years of her life she held the blind God successfully at arm's length; but then, as she herself said, " being tired of waiting for a husband," she followed the prudent example of Mahomet, and finding that the mountain would not come to her, quietly went to the mountain. In plain English she determined, as no one chose her for a wife, that she would choose some one for a husband. When a person can choose for himself, he generally acts as if sworn at Highgate; and Miss Thomas, notwithstanding her thirty-eight years, selected a lad of fourteen. What, however, may be thought extraordinary, on her marriage she immediately sent the youth to Turin to learn the business of a cook; and, dressing herself as a man, entered the service of the Princess Triulzi, in the laborious employment of courier. Her disguise had the usual effect of placing her in equivocal situations; and malice, or vanity, made her give so much “cause of uneasiness" to a "worthy" husband in the prince's family, as produced a horrible scandal. To avoid a disgraceful dismissal from her service, and the loss of her "fair friend's" character, she was obliged to confess her sex, and re-assume her woman's attire. : After this she passed through various services in an employment little favourable to long life,-that, namely, of a cook in which department of science, if her boastings were not wholly vainglorious, she attained to considerable renown. E le pietanze suoe furo applaudite Following the usual course of preferment in her profession, she finally became innkeeper at Lans-le-burg. Her first husband having died at the age of nineteen, without having entered on his marital rights, she shortly afterwards married in real earnest (sero sed serio) a young man of twenty-five, who was her ostler. This stable connexion was formed at the mature age of forty-eight, and it lasted uninterrupted for thirteen years, (though, as may be supposed, without issue,) when her husband, to preserve, as I imagine, the dramatic unity of his life, was thrown from his horse, and broke his neck. The grief of La donna on this occasion was not so great as to deprive her of all resource; and though she did not a third time seek a partner of her labours, she continued in the arduous avocation of innkeeper, in that elevated region of all but eternal snows, till the year 1815; when her house was burned by a fire, which consumed her whole property, occasioning a loss of fifteen thousand livres. From this fire, which she attributes to the revenge of a party of Austrian soldiers, at the age of 101 years, she escaped in her shift; saving only from the flames herself and her coffee-mill. In this destitute condition, undaunted by calamity, or the advanced period of her life, she undertook and accomplished a pedestrian journey across the mountain to Turin, in order to present herself to the King of Sardinia, from whose bounty she obtained a small pension; on which (with the donations of travellers) she lives as she says, contented and happy; eating with a good appetite, walking erect and firm, and not having lost a tooth. She is still fond of dancing, and, as she said, passed an entire night, during the Carnival of 1817, in that fatiguing, though exhilarating, exercise. If what the poet says be true, that "non est vivere sed valere vita," this lady, in her "cruda viridisque senectus," seems to have carried the palm of longevity from all former pretenders. If any of your readers, Mr. Editor, of macrobiotic tendencies, counting on her example, should wish to try the virtues of the Lans-le-burg air, I can assure them that they will find there a neat little inn, kept by a neat little English woman; but, if they will take my advice, they will take shelter there for the night only, and hasten forward to the smiling plains of Lombardy, even at the risk of not equalling in years, La donna de cento quattr' anni. M. STANZAS. Supposed to have been written by Lord Fitzgerald on the Night of his being arrested. OH! Ireland, my country! the hour Of thy pride and thy splendour hath pass'd And the chain which was spurn'd in thy moment of power There are marks in the fate of each clime, There are turns in the fortunes of men; But the changes of realms or the chances of time Thou art chain'd to the wheel of the foe By links which the world shall not sever; With thy tyrants through storm and through calm thou shalt go, Thou art doom'd for the thankless to toil; Thou art left for the proud to disdain ; And the blood of thy sons, and the wealth of thy soil Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; Thy valour with coldness repaid; And of millions who see thee thus sunk and forsaken In the nations thy place is left void; Thou art lost in the list of the free: Even realms by the plague and the earthquake destroy'd May revive-but no hope is for thee. F. |