? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured
their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of
fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only
the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the
dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and
marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton,
struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with
blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights
of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if
you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which
shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of
the century,--Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay,
Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,--all these, with scarcely an
exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it
with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living
the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted
to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry,
broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have
destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw
off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than
sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length
of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.

You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of
purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers.
You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of
excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid
notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of
erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just
the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the
thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we
could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at
the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must
figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the
Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That
resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose
names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy