a most pleasing picture. With a taste for study, which he found rather
inconvenient in the moveable existence of a man of the world, and a
military wanderer, he had, however, contrived to reserve an hour or two
every day for literary pursuits. The men of science, with whom he had
chiefly associated, appear to have turned his passion to observation and
knowledge rather than towards imagination and feeling; the combination
formed a wreath for his grey hairs. When Count De Tressan retired from a
brilliant to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he pursued his
literary tastes with the vivacity of a young author inspired by the
illusion of fame. At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination
of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recomposed his old Chivalric
Romances, and his reanimated fancy struck fire in the veins of the
old man. Among the first designs of his retirement was a singular
philosophical legacy for his children. It was a view of the history and
progress of the human mind--of its principles, its errors, and its
advantages, as these were reflected in himself; in the dawnings of his
taste, and the secret inclinations of his mind, which the men of genius of
the age with whom he associated had developed. Expatiating on their
memory, he calls on his children to witness the happiness of study, so
evident in those pleasures which were soothing and adorning his old
age. "Without knowledge, without literature," exclaims the venerable
enthusiast, "in whatever rank we are born, we can only resemble the
vulgar." To the centenary FONTENELLE the Count DE TRESSAN was chiefly
indebted for the happy life he derived from the cultivation of literature;
and when this man of a hundred years died, TRESSAN, himself on the borders
of the grave, would offer the last fruits of his mind in an _eloge_ to his
ancient master. It was the voice of the dying to the dead, a last moment
of the love and sensibility of genius, which feeble life could not
extinguish. The genius of CICERO, inspired by the love of literature, has
thrown something delightful over this latest season of life, in his _de
Senectute_. To have written on old age, in old age, is to have obtained a
triumph over Time.[A]

[Footnote A: "Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age," by the late Sir
Thomas Bernard, was written a year or two before he died.]

When the literary character shall discover himself to be like a stranger
in a new world, when all that he loved has not