r for playing
the musician, like Handel and Haydn, when over seventy; but by good
management we may do wonders.

The wisest men and the best have been conspicuous for working to the
end, not taking the least advantage of the leisure to which one might
think they were entitled. They have found their joy in pursuing labors
which they believed useful either to themselves or to others. John
Locke began a "Fourth Letter on Toleration" only a few weeks before he
died, and "the few pages in the posthumous volume, ending in an
unfinished sentence, seem to have exhausted his remaining strength."
The fire of Galileo's genius burned to the very end. He was engaged in
dictating to two of his disciples his latest theories on a favorite
subject, when the slow fever seized him that brought him to the grave.
Sir Edward Coke spent the last six years of his life in revising and
improving the works upon which his fame now rests. John Wesley only
the year before he died wrote: "I am now an old man, decayed from head
to foot.... However, blessed be God! I do not slack my labors; I can
preach and write still." Arnauld, one of the greatest of French
theologians and philosophers, retained, says Disraeli, "the vigor of
his genius and the command of his pen to his last day, and at the age
of eighty-two was still the great Arnauld." It was he who, when urged
in his old age to rest from his labors, exclaimed, "Rest! Shall we not
have the whole of eternity to rest in?"

A healthy old age cannot be reached without the exercise of many
virtues. There must have been prudence, self-denial, and temperance at
the very least. According to the proverb, he that would be long an old
man must begin early to be one, and the beginning early just means
taking a great many precautions commonly neglected till it is too
late. More people would be found completing their pilgrimage at a late
date if it were not that, as a French writer puts it, "Men do not
usually die; they kill themselves." It is carelessness about the most
ordinary rules of healthy living.

The enjoyment of old age may be looked on then as a reward, and the
aged may pride themselves on being heirs to a rich inheritance,
assigned to forethought and common sense. Many years are an honor.
They are an honor even in the case of the worldly, and a great deal
more so when life has been regulated by motives higher than any the
world can show. "The hoary head," says Solomon, "is a crown of glory;"
but h