n was delighted with the discovery of this circumstance in the lives
of painters. "As I grow older, I feel the desire of surpassing myself."
And it was in the last years of his life, that with the finest poetical
invention, he painted the allegorical pictures of the Seasons. A man of
letters in his sixtieth year once told me, "It is but of late years that I
have learnt the right use of books and the art of reading."

Time, the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges
the patrimony of literature to its possessor. A learned and highly
intellectual friend once said to me, "If I have acquired more knowledge
these last four years than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to my
stores in the next four years; and so at every subsequent period of my
life, should I acquire only in the same proportion, the general mass of my
knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we are not deprived by nature or
misfortune of the means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of
knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fully occupied and deeply
interested even to the last day of our earthly term." Such is the
delightful thought of Owen Feltham; "If I die to-morrow, my life will be
somewhat the sweeter to-day for knowledge." The perfectibility of the
human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Stael, consists in the
mass of our ideas, to which every age will now add, by means unknown to
preceding generations. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her arts
find a term to their progress; but there is no boundary to knowledge nor
the discovery of thought.

How beautiful in the old age of the literary character was the plan which
a friend of mine pursued! His mind, like a mirror whose quicksilver had
not decayed, reflected all objects to the last. Pull of learned studies
and versatile curiosity, he annually projected a summer-tour on the
Continent to some remarkable spot. The local associations were an
unfailing source of agreeable impressions to a mind so well prepared, and
he presented his friends with a "Voyage Litteraire," as a new-year's gift.
In such pursuits, where life is "rather wearing out than rusting out," as
Bishop Cumberland expressed it, scarcely shall we feel those continued
menaces of death which shake the old age of men of no intellectual
pursuits, who are dying so many years.

Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, constitute the happiness
of literary men. The study of the arts and literature sp