g Constantinople at ninety-four, and after the revolt again
victorious, and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne of the
Eastern Empire, which he declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven. We still
feel the force of Socrates, "whom well-advised the oracle pronounced
wisest of men"; of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his
wit, and himself better than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing
the four crowns of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of
Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, "The noblest eye is darkened
that Nature ever made,--an eye that hath seen more than all that went
before him, and hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him"; of
Newton, who made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five
years; of Bacon, who "took all knowledge to be his province"; of
Fontenelle, "that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France
to be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years"; of Franklin,
Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the
perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the
all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopaedia of science.

Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily count
particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the perilous capes
and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken
away in removing the grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship expires as
she enters the harbor at home. It were strange, if a man should turn his
sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of
dangers he has escaped. When the old wife says, "Take care of that tumor
in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,"--he replies, "What if it is?"
The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the
froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a pang to
the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his
knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia of the cows raged,
the butchers said, that, though the acute degree was novel, there never
was a time when this disease did not occur among cattle. All men carry
seeds of all distempers through life latent, and we die without developing
them: such is the affirmative force of the constitution. But if you are
enfeebled by any cause, the disease becomes strong. At every stage we lose
a foe. At fifty years, 't is s