ckness and got done with it
for good is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant.

*****

When we grow elderly, how the room brightens and begins to look as it
ought to look, on the entrance of youth, grace, health and comeliness!
You do not want them for yourself, perhaps not even for your son, but
you look on smiling; and when you recall their images--again it is
with a smile. I defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an
infinite and intimate but quite impersonal pleasure.

*****

To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no respect; and
hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a
verbal fencing-bout, and misapprehensions to become engrained. And there
is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect
notion of the child's character, formed in early years or during the
equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts
which suit with his pre-conception; and wherever a person fancies
himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to
speak truth.

*****

So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted
for the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence
that restrains our hopes quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are
less intense, the troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word,
this period for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time
of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest
of life. Nay, by managing its own work and following its own happy
inspiration, youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of
age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and
independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into a bore.

*****

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth
is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and
delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

*****

The schoolboy has a keen sense of humour. Heroes he learns to understand
and to admire in books; but he is not forward to recognise the heroic
under the traits of any contemporary.

*****

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their
own in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the
opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts
of allowances are made for the illusions