on for moralizing and
retrospect. _Eheu! fugaces anni_ is a sigh that even the Latin primer
teaches us; and though in schoolbook days calling the years fugacious
seems absurd, we catch the meaning as they glide away. To schoolboys the
man of fifty is immoderately old: thirty marks a milestone on the
downhill of life. People whom we looked upon as of great antiquity, in
childhood, turn out to have been mere striplings. I saw "old Kent"
yesterday after the lapse of thirty years, and protest he was younger
than when he rapped sepulchral silence from his resounding desk. "How
are you, Quilibet First?" he said, quite in the ancient way; he seemed
once more to brandish the ferrule on his awful throne.

Boys always call schoolmasters and sextons "old," irrespective of their
years. Clerks in the shop style their employer "the old gentleman"
without meaning to impute antiquity. Gray-haired diggers and pounders
speak of their overseer as "the old man," even though he be a
rosy-cheeked youth of two-and-twenty. Lexicographers should look to
this. "Old" evidently means sometimes "having independent authority,"
and does not necessarily signify either lack of freshness or being
stricken in years. Thus Philip Festus Bailey's dictum, that "we live in
deeds, not years," is borne out by common parlance, and future
Worcesters and Websters must make a note of it.

Whoever, also, reaches a fixed position of authority, seems (rightly
enough, as the world goes) to have achieved success in life. This
measurement of success by the kind of occupation one follows begins with
us in short clothes. Mary's ambition is to be "either a milliner, a
queen, or a cook;" the ideal of Augustus is a woodchopper, killing bears
when they attack him at his work, and living in a hut. The sons of
confectioners must be marvels if they grow up alike unspoiled in morals
by the universal envy of comrades, and unspoiled in teeth by the
parental sugar-plums. People of older growth attach childish importance
to the trade one plies. Nobs and nabobs (at least on the stage)
disinherit daughters offhand for marrying grocers, and groan over sons
who take to high art. The smug and prudent citizen shudders at the
career of the filibuster, while the adventurer would commit suicide
rather than achieve a modest livelihood in tape and needles. The mother
of Sainte Beuve was sorely distressed at his pursuit of literature, a
career that she reckoned mere vagabondage, despite his bril