self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the
soul, a thought that youth is flown for ever? None but the blessed few
that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the
shedding of their vernal blossoms, a promise that the season of immortal
fruit is near. It is a frailty, almost an instance of humanity, to aim
at concealing that from others, of which ourselves are painfully
conscious. The herculean Johnson keenly resented the least allusion to
the shortness of his sight. So entirely is man a social animal, so
dependent are all his feelings for their very existence upon
communication and sympathy, that the "fee griefs," which none but
ourselves are privy to, are forgotten as soon as they are removed from
the senses. The artifices to which so many have recourse to conceal
their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves,
than to impose on others. This aversion to growing old is specially
natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless. The borrowed
curls, the pencilled eyebrows,

"The steely-prison'd shape,
So oft made taper, by constraint of tape,"

the various cosmetic secrets, well-known to the middle ages, not only of
the softer sex, are not unseemly in a spinster, so long as they succeed
in making her look young. They are intolerable in a mother of any age.
But we, my dear Christopher, resigned and benevolent old bachelors as we
are, can well appreciate the vanity of the aged heart, that sees not its
youth renewed in any growing dearer self. Nothing denotes the advances
of life, at once so surely and so pleasantly as children springing up
around a good man's table. Perhaps our famous Queen, in her latter days,
though full of honours as of years, would gladly have changed places
with the wife of any yeoman that had a child to receive her last
blessing, whose few acres were not to pass away to the hungry expecting
son of a hated rival. Her virginity was not like that of Jephthah's
daughter, a free-will offering to the Lord. Pride, and policy, and
disappointment, and, it may be, hopeless, self-condemned affection,
conspired to perpetuate it. Probably it was well for England that no
offspring of hers inherited her throne. By some strange ordinance of
nature, it generally happens that these wonderful clever women produce
idiots or madmen.--Witness Semiramis, Agrippina, Catherine de Medicis,
Mary de Medicis, Catherine of Russia, and Lady Wortley Montague. One
miniature