y as he does then. He cannot call to mind any middle-aged
or elderly gentleman of his acquaintance who is known to exhibit
symptoms of frantic attachment, but that does not interfere in his
belief in himself. His love will never fall, whoever else's may. Nobody
ever loved as he loves, and so, of course, the rest of the world's
experience can be no guide in his case. Alas! alas! ere thirty he has
joined the ranks of the sneerers. It is not his fault. Our passions,
both the good and bad, cease with our blushes. We do not hate, nor
grieve, nor joy, nor despair in our thirties like we did in our teens.
Disappointment does not suggest suicide, and we quaff success without
intoxication.

We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few
majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes
a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently
adapts itself to circumstances. And love--love dies. "Irreverence for
the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts.
The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and
of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is
left but a sapless stump.

My fair friends will deem all this rank heresy, I know. So far from a
man's not loving after he has passed boyhood, it is not till there is a
good deal of gray in his hair that they think his protestations at all
worthy of attention. Young ladies take their notions of our sex from the
novels written by their own, and compared with the monstrosities
that masquerade for men in the pages of that nightmare literature,
Pythagoras' plucked bird and Frankenstein's demon were fair average
specimens of humanity.

In these so-called books, the chief lover, or Greek god, as he is
admiringly referred to--by the way, they do not say which "Greek god"
it is that the gentleman bears such a striking likeness to; it might be
hump-backed Vulcan, or double-faced Janus, or even driveling Silenus,
the god of abstruse mysteries. He resembles the whole family of them,
however, in being a blackguard, and perhaps this is what is meant. To
even the little manliness his classical prototypes possessed, though,
he can lay no claim whatever, being a listless effeminate noodle, on
the shady side of forty. But oh! the depth and strength of this elderly
party's emotion for some bread-and-butter school-girl! Hide your heads,
ye young Romeos and Leanders! this _blase_