a wise man paralysed; the wise man is a book which still thinks
and writes.

These ideas did not hold; the book superseded the old man, and the old
man no longer was a library to the nation.

Later still, for various reasons, the old men drifted from a position of
respect to one of ridicule. Undoubtedly they lend themselves to this;
they are obstinate, foolish, prosy, boring, crotchety and unpleasant to
look upon. Comic writers poked fun at these failings which are only too
self-evident and showered ridicule upon them. Then as the majority of
audiences is composed of young men, first of all because there are more
young men than old, and secondly because old men do not often go to the
theatre, authors of comic plays were certain of raising a laugh by
turning old men into ridicule, or rather by exposing only their
ridiculous characteristics.

At Athens and at Rome and probably elsewhere, the old man was one of the
principal grotesque characters. These things, as Rousseau pointed out,
have a great effect upon morals. Once the old man became a recognised
traditional stage-butt, his social authority had come to an end. In the
_de Senectute_ it is obvious that Cicero is running counter to the
stream in seeking to restore to favour a character about whom the public
is indifferent and for whom all he can do is to plead extenuating
circumstances.

It is a remarkable fact that even in mediaeval epics, Charlemagne
himself, the emperor of the flowing beard, often plays a comic part. The
epic is invaded by the atmosphere of the fable.

During the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
old man is generally, though not invariably, held up to ridicule.

Moliere takes his lead from Aristophanes and Plautus rather than from
Terence and is the scourge of old age as well as "the scourge of the
ridiculous"; he pursues the old as a hound his prey and never leaves
them in peace either in his poetry or his prose.

We must do this much justice to Rousseau that both he and his child, the
Revolution, tried to restore the old man to his former glory; he makes
honourable mention of him in his writings, and she gives him important
posts in public ceremonies and national fetes. Therein were received the
ancient memories of Lacedaemon and of early Rome, combined with a form of
reaction against the days of Louis XIV and Louis XV.

But with the triumph of democracy the old man was finally banished to
the limbo of discredite