e points
the moral which he puts into the mouth of his Adam--

"Therefore mine age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty but kindly".

It is a miserable old age, says the Roman, which is obliged to appeal to
its grey hairs as its only claim to the respect of its juniors. "Neither
hoar hairs nor wrinkles can arrogate reverence as their right. It is the
life whose opening years have been honourably spent which reaps the reward
of reverence at its close".

In discussing the last of the evils which accompany old age, the near
approach of death, Cicero rises to something higher than his usual level.
His Cato will not have death to be an evil at all; it is to him the
escaping from "the prison of the body",--the "getting the sight of land at
last after a long voyage, and coming into port". Nay, he does not admit
that death is death. "I have never been able to persuade myself"; he says,
quoting the words of Cyrus in Xenophon, "that our spirits were alive while
they were in these mortal bodies, and died only when they departed out of
them; or that the spirit then only becomes void of sense when it escapes
from a senseless body; but that rather when freed from all admixture of
corporality, it is pure and uncontaminated, then it most truly has sense".
"I am fully persuaded", he says to his young listeners, "that your two
fathers, my old and dearly-loved friends, are living now, and living that
life which only is worthy to be so called". And he winds up the dialogue
with the very beautiful apostrophe, one of the last utterances of the
philosopher's heart, well known, yet not too well known to be here quoted:

"It likes me not to mourn over departing life, as many men, and men of
learning, have done. Nor can I regret that I have lived, since I have so
lived that I may trust I was not born in vain; and I depart out of life as
out of a temporary lodging, not as out of my home. For nature has given
it to us as an inn to tarry at by the way, not as a place to abide in.
O glorious day! when I shall set out to join that blessed company and
assembly of disembodied spirits, and quit this crowd and rabble of life!
For I shall go my way, not only to those great men of whom I spoke, but
to my own son Cato, than whom was never better man born, nor more full of
dutiful affection; whose body I laid on the funeral pile--an office he
should rather have done for me.[1] But his spirit has never left me; it
still looks fondly back upon me, though it has