time, in the fulness of their hearts, they refer to some freak of their
own youth, they appear to do it with a sort of apology to themselves,
that such wise individuals as they are now should ever have done such
things! And as the world stands at present, it is the old story of the
Lion and the Painter; the elderly gentlemen are likely to have it their
own way; they say what they like, while the young ones are content to do
what they like. And the more absurdity a man displays in his teens, (and
some, it must be confessed, are absurd enough) the more insupportable an
air of wisdom does he put on when he gets settled. And as there is no
hope of these sedate gentry being sent to College again to teach the
rising generation of under-graduates the art of precocious gravity, and
still less hope of their arriving at it of themselves, perhaps there is
no harm in mooting the question on neutral ground, whether such a
consummation as that of putting old heads upon young shoulders is
altogether desirable.

Wherefore, I, Frank Hawthorne--being of the age of nine-and-twenty, or
thereabouts, and of sound mind, and about to renounce for ever all claim
and title to be considered a young man; having married a wife, and left
sack and all other bad habits; having no longer any fellowship with
under-graduates, or army subs, or medical students, or young men about
town, or any other class of the heterogeneous irregulars who make up
"Young England"--being a perfectly disinterested party in the question,
inasmuch as having lost my reputation for youth, I have never acquired
one for wisdom--hereby raise my voice against the intolerable cant,
which assumes every man to be a hare-brained scapegrace at twenty, and
Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in
more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are
empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool," &c., (musty as the proverb
is, it is rather from neglect than over-application.) I have known men
by the dozen, who in their youth were either empty-headed coxcombs or
noisy sots; does my reader think that any given number of additional
years has made them able statesmen, sound lawyers, or erudite divines?
that because they have become honourable by a seat in Parliament,
learned by courtesy, reverend by office, they are therefore really more
useful members of society than when they lounged the High Street, or
woke the midnight echoes of the quadrangle? N