To-day, my dear, I greatly astonished my grandson by standing on my head, and by entering the kitchen by turning a back-somersault through the door—exercises which I frequently practise for the benefit of my digestion, but not often in public. His bewilderment at seeing a man of my years perform such acrobatics was most comical. But there, there, one must amuse one’s self with the young sometimes. I have thought more or less seriously of advising these exercises for general use; but few men have had the advantage of being brought up in a circus, and what seems easy to me would no doubt present insuperable obstacles to most. The main thing, after all, is not to grow old before your time, because the silly younger generation likes to flatter itself by thinking you antediluvian.—Letters of Father William.

FEW men read Shakespeare, and so, fortunately enough, few think of themselves as being some day a pantaloon—lean and slippered (as Shakespeare described this sixth age of man), with spectacles on nose, his youthful hose, well-saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice, turning again to childish treble, operating like a penny whistle when he tries to converse. But the Bard made a bogey: at any rate, there are fewer pantaloons visible than there probably were in Elizabethan England; and the sixth age of man appears more logically to offer a kind of Indian summer that is well worth living for. Shakespeare, it seems to me, slipped a cog in his sequence; and I prefer to think of Cornaro, the Italian centenarian, who began at forty to restrict his diet (though this I care less for), and wrote of himself at eighty-three: “I enjoy a happy state of body and mind. I can mount my horse without assistance; I climb steep hills; and I have lately written a play abounding in innocent wit and humor. And I am a stranger to those peevish and morose humors which fall so often to the lot of old age.”

Granting some other choice of mental employment,—for writing that kind of a play seems nowadays too useless an occupation even for an old man’s leisure,—this is the kind of an old man I should like to be.

In the light of recent scientific research with flies, Cornaro probably inherited his longevity from long-lived ancestors, and would have done about as well on a less restricted diet: he might reasonably have lasted as long if not as comfortably. Ideas have changed since Pope asked himself,—

and promptly answered,—

Man since then has provided himself with a remarkably good microscopic eye. He has inspected the mite, and discovered resemblances between this innocently disgusting little insect and himself, which make it desirable, in some cases, to suspend the swatter, and study instead of assassinate. Granting that the proper study of mankind is Man, the proper study of mankind is Flies; for the days of a fly present an entertaining and instructive parallel to the years of a man: a seventy-year-old man and a seventy-day-old fly are contemporaries; other things being equal, they might almost be called twins. Confined in glass bottles and observed impartially from birth to burial, each baby fly, it appears, inherits a maximum number of days on this perplexing planet, and lives fewer according to the activity with which he expends his inheritance. If flies had copybooks one might compose a maxim for little flies to copy,—

Thus one scientific gentleman has watched, godlike, the lives of 5836 flies—3216 fair flies (if I may so call them), and 2620 of their natural, and only, admirers—from their separate birth-minutes till each in turn paid his or her little debt to nature, and passed away. It is an odd thing to contemplate—this self-election of a man to the positions of guardian, health officer, divine providence, nursemaid, matchmaker, clergyman, physician, undertaker, and sexton to 5836 flies. Yet it redounds to his credit, and is another proof of the poet’s contention that we men are superior: for what fly would ever think of studying us to find out anything about himself? And, by deduction, I, like the little fly, inherit my span of life, although either accident or a germ may get me if I don’t watch out.

But even if man, like the fly, inherits his individual length of life, he will, again like the fly, go on living it with little concern as to whatever invisible string may be fastened to his inheritance. He will think hopefully that any ancestor he has had who died by violence or a germ might otherwise have lived to be as hale and hearty as Father William, that lively sage whose habit was to stand on his head at intervals, and to enter a door by turning a back-somersault. Heredity is still a mystery; the ancestry of free men is much more complicated than that of flies in bottles; and any of us, if he anxiously carried his genealogical research far enough back, would find a goodly number of forbears, prematurely carried off, from whom he might reasonably have inherited quite a lot of what the scientific mind calls the “hypothetical substance or substances which normally prevent old age and natural death.” Flies growing gracefully old in glass bottles therefore need not worry us, and every ancestor who has been hanged is a reason for optimism.

And there is another reason even more valuable than a pendent ancestor. You and I, gentle Reader, have souls (though there may be times of discouragement when we wish we hadn’t), and old age is a mere trivial incident in our jolly eternal lives. Willy-nilly, we begin growing older, by the conventional measurement of time, with our first breath; but who can prove that we are not in reality very much older than we look in the beginning, and very much younger than we look in the end? I get these sober thoughts from the laboratory rather than the pulpit, from evolution rather than dogma. O aged fly, to whom your seventy days are a long life and your glass bottle a perfectly natural and normal world in which to have lived it! O aged man, to whom your seventy years are a long life, and who may also have lived it, for all you know, in a kind of glass bottle, big enough to contain comfortably this little planet and all the visible stars! Whoever respects age for its own sake must impartially salute you both.

“It is a man’s own fault,” said Dr. Johnson, then seventy years old, but no pantaloon, “it is from want of use, if the mind grows torpid in old age.” And so plausible is this observation, that any reasonably intelligent man might make it to his wife at breakfast without at all astonishing her. Here, to be sure, one gets no help from flies in glass bottles who depart this world according as they fly more or fly less, for theirs apparently is a democracy in which no outside observer can yet say that any one fly thinks more or thinks less than another. A scientific study of 5836 old men (in biographies instead of bottles) would very likely do no more than verify the generalization that any thinker may make at breakfast. And this being the case, civilization tends naturally enough to reduce the number of pantaloons. Universal education, books, newspapers, magazines, politics, movies, anything and everything that to any degree employs and exercises the mind, postpones its torpidity; and statistics indicate that an increasing proportion of babies live to be middle-aged people—but a decreasing proportion of middle-aged people live to be old enough to become pantaloons. For many a not-so-very-promising baby survives nowadays who would have perished under earlier conditions; and many a man gets to middle life who would otherwise be dead already, and lacks the “pep,” as a popular magazine editor might say, to get very much further. What a survival of the fittest, for example, was that of the beautiful Galeria Copiola, who, I have read, made her first dazzling appearance in the theatre of ancient Rome at the age of ninety! She acted and danced; and Roman playgoers of seventy, sitting in the front rows, had opportunity to become madly infatuated with a charmer twenty years their senior, such as now falls only to the lot of the college undergraduate or the tired business man. And if anybody doubts this surprising youthfulness of Galeria, I offer the corroborative evidence of the seventeenth-century pamphlet, “The Olde, Olde, very Olde Man; or the Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr,” in which John Taylor, the Water Poet, describes the pre-Adamite who was brought up to London at the age of 152, met the King, and had such a great good time in general, that his death nine months later was attributed to over-excitement.

(I have looked up “metheglin,” and I find it to have been a “strong liquor made by mixing honey with water and flavoring it, yeast or some similar ferment being added, and the whole allowed to ferment.” “Ale” was also a liquor, but made from malt. “Nappy” means heady and strong: “Nappie ale,” says an old writer, was “so called because, if you taste it thoroughly, it will either catch you by the nape of the neck or cause you to take a nappe of sleepe.” The use of these drinks, it may still be argued, shortened Parr’s life; but the fly-research that I have mentioned seems to indicate that their tendency to decrease physical activity by inducing “nappes” may have materially helped him to conserve his inheritance of longevity.)

But these cases are exceptional, and for my part I have no desire to be the Thomas Parr of the twentieth or twenty-first century. It is more important to live right (and there, indeed, is a job for anybody!) than to live long; and old age, like young love, is often oversentimentalized. Mr. Boswell, I think, oversentimentalized it when he asked his long-suffering friend, “But, sir, would you not know old age?... I mean, sir, the Sphinx’s description of it—morning, noon, and night. I would know night as well as morning and noon.” And the doctor restored the subject to its proper place when he answered: “Nay, sir, what talk is this? Would you know the gout? Would you have decrepitude?” He might, indeed, have gone further. “Do you suppose, sir” (he might have added), “you will know night when you see it? Why, sir, what does a baby know about morning?”

So with Pantaloon: we comparative youngsters have only an external and objective idea of him—his slippers, his stockings, his peevish and morose humors, his feeble mirth and empty garrulity. What living is really like to him we cannot know until we are pantaloons ourselves, and then, mayhap, we shall have forgotten what living is like to us now; let it suffice that we shall probably be far less bothered by our shrunk shanks and piping voices than we now believe possible. At the same time, it will do no harm for some of us to “watch our step.” Already I—and there must be many another like me—am sometimes a little peevish and a little morose; a mere soupÇon reasonably explainable by natural causes—but there it is! I am hardly aware of it myself. Yet when it is called to my attention by those nearest and dearest to me, I experience an odd, perverse inclination to be more peevish and more morose than before. I enjoy, I take a queer, twisted, unnatural, hateful, demoniac pleasure, like Mr. Hyde when Dr. Jekyll turned into him, in the idea of being more peevish and more morose. Here indeed is something to look out for: resist that inclination, and we are laying the foundation of a serene and respected old age; obey that impulse, and we comfort the Devil, and run the risk of some day becoming, not only old men, but old nuisances. I do not know, though I very much doubt, that one old fly is ever more peevish and morose than another old fly; but with mankind, whose superior intelligence so often makes trouble for his associates, the variations are visible. Savages, unhampered by the conventions of an artificial civilization, have efficiently knocked their elders on the head in consequence.

Let us, then, do our best to beat the Devil, and prepare for that Indian summer, which, with all respect to Shakespeare, is the true sixth age of man. And they reach it best (to judge by some who have got there) who do their daily work with a good conscience, share their incidental joys with others, and meet their troubles in the spirit of that stout old seaman, Sir Andrew Barton, as I the other day saw his ballad quoted with reference to R. L. Stevenson:—