ment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of
ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they
do not choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but
perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of
age than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive
experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his
_savoir_. I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank
after all; I doubt if he would be such an admirable son as we are led to
expect; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would
out-Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.
Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks
with the portly air of a high-priest, and after whom dances many a
successful merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to
cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be
denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments
his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes
last. It seems just as much to the point that youth comes first. And the
scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority
of cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of
even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense
of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be
suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes is tragical
enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in
the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never
to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on
the confines of farce. The victim is dead--and he has cunningly
overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd
for being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns
sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a
whole cellar--a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives
with cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but
that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable
pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than
problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age. We should not
compliment a hungry man, who should re