CHAPTER III.-CONTINUED.

OLD AGE.

THE following is from Bacon's History of Life and Death:

"Lastly, since it is convenient to know the character and form of old age; which will be done best by making a careful collection of all the differences in the state and functions of the body between youth and old age, that by them you may see what it is that branches out into so many effects."

"The differences between youth and old age are these: A young man's skin is even and smooth, an old man's dry and wrinkled, especially about the eyes and forehead; a young man's flesh is soft and tender, an old man's hard; youth has strength and activity, old age decay of strength and slowness of motion; youth has a strong, old age a weak digestion; a young man's bowels are soft and succulent, an old man's salt and parched; in youth the body is erect, in old age bent into a curve; a young man's limbs are firm, an old man's weak and trembling; in youth the humors are billious and the blood hot, in old age the humors are phlegmatic and melancholy, and the blood cold; a young man's sexual passions are quick, an old man's slow; in youth the juices of the body are more roscid, in old age more crude and watery; in youth the spirit is plentiful and effervescent, in old age poor and scanty; in youth the spirit is dense and fresh, in old age dull and impaired; a young man's teeth are strong and perfect, an old man's weak, worn, and falling out; a young man's hair is colored, an old man's (whatever color it formerly was) white; youth has hair, old age baldness; in youth the pulse beats stronger and quicker, in old age weaker and slower,

a young man's illnesses are more acute and curable, an old man's chronic and hard to cure; in youth, wounds heal fast, in old age slowly; a young man's cheeks are fresh colored, an old man's pale or rubicund, and the blood thick; youth is less troubled with rheums, age more so. Neither, as far as I know, does age bring any improvement to the body unless it be sometimes in fatness.'

(Note also in the following exemplifications the continued antithesis between old age and youth.)

"A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax hollow."Henry V., V., 2.

"Falstaff. You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young: you measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls: and we that are in the vanward of our youth, I must confess, are wags too.

"Ch. Justice. Do you set down your name in scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? And will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, Sir John."—II., Henry IV., I., 2.

"Falstaff. Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, hath yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time."-Id.

"why I desire thee

To give me secret harbor, hath a purpose More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends Of burning youth."-Measure for Measure, I., 4. "Thou art Hermione; or, rather thou art she In thy not chiding; for she was as tender As infancy and grace,- But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled; nothing So aged as this seems."— Winter's Tale, V., 3. “And for an old aunt, whom the Greeks held captive, He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness

Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes stale the morning."
-Troil. and Cress., II., 2.

"Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth."

K. Lear, I., 4.

"Thou bring'st happiness and peace, Sir John; But health, alack, with youthful wings is flown From this bare withered trunk."

-II., Henry IV., IV., 4. "To shake all cares and business from our age; Conferring them on younger strength, while we Unburden'd crawl towards death."-K. Lear, I., 1. "Son of sixteen,

Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire." *
-Tim. of Athens, IV., 1.

"that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor,"

-Troil. and Cress., V., 4.

"I will now take my leave of these six dry, round, old withered knights."-II., Henry IV., II., 4.

"We had like to have had our two noses snapped off with two old men without teeth."-Much Ado, V., 1.

"Nurse. I'll lay fourteen of my teeth

And yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four
She is not fourteen."-Romeo and Juliet, I., 3.

"Dromio. There's no time for a man to recover his hair, that grows bald by nature.

Ant. May he not do it by fine and recovery?

Dromio. Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig, and recover the lost hair of another man.

*The scale or succession of stages in the human body is this; conception, gray hairs and baldness, cessation of the menstrua and of the generative power, tendency to decrepitude and a three legged animal, death. In the meantime the mind. also has its periods, though they cannot be described by years; as a failing memory and the like, of which hereafter."-History of Life and Death.

"Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

· --As You Like It, II., 7.

Ant. But your reason was not substantial, why there is no time to recover.

Com. of

Dromio. Thus I mend it: Time himself is bald, and therefore, to the world's end, will have bald followers.' Errors, II., 2.

"Thou canst help time to furrow me with age, But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage."

-Richard II., I., 3.

"To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,
To view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow,
An age of poverty."-Merchant of Venice, IV.,
"That so his sickness, age, and impotence."

1.

Hamlet, II., 2.

"When sapless age, and weak unable limbs, Should bring thy father to his drooping chair."

-I., Henry VI., IV., 5.

"That he is old (the more the pity) his white hairs do witness it."—I., Henry IV., II., 4.

Why, how now, Kate? I hope thou art not mad;
This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither'd;

And not a maiden, as thou say'st he is."

-Taming of the Shrew, IV., 5.

"Hamlet. Slanders, sir: for the satirical slave says here, that old men have gray beards; that their faces are wrinkled; their eyes purging thick amber, or plum-tree gum; and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with weak hams: all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honestly to have it thus set down; for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward. Polonius. Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” -Hamlet, II., 2.

Bacon continues the record of his observations:

"Next in order comes the consideration of the affections of the mind. I remember when I was a young man at Poictiers in France that I was very intimate with a young Frenchman of great wit, but somewhat talkative, who afterwards turned out a very eminent man. He used to inveigh against the manners of old men, and say that if their minds could be seen as well as their bodies, they

would appear no less deformed; and further indulging his fancy, he argued that the defects of their minds had some parallel and correspondence with those of the body. To dryness of the skin he opposed impudence; to hardness of the bowels, hardness of the heart; to blear eyes,* envy, and the evil eye; to sunken eyes and bowing of the body to the ground, atheism (for they no longer, he says, look up to heaven); to the trembling of the limbs, vacillation of purpose and inconstancy; to the bending and clutching of the fingers, rapacity and avarice; to the tottering of the knees, timidity; to wrinkles, cunning and crooked ways; and other parallels which do not now occur to me. But to be serious; youth has modesty and a sense of shame, old age is somewhat hardened; a young man has

"Bru. All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights
Are spectacled to see him."-Coriolanus, II., 1.

A characteristic blunder. Spectacles were not invented till towards the close of the thirteenth century. See Enc. Brit., Article, Spectacles. In his Essay, Of Friendship, Bacon says: "It was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, 'That speech was like the cloth of Arras, opened and put abroad; whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thoughts they lie but as in packs.'

999

In Bohn's edition of the Essays, Devey, the editor, says in a note: "Speaking hypercritically, Lord Bacon commits an anachronism here, as Arras did not manufacture tapestry till the middle ages."

For other mistakes see also the same edition, pages 101, 118, 172, 173, 175, 180, 182, 184, 189.

Abbott, Bacon's biographer, says of him: "We have absolute proof that he was eminently inattentive to details. His scientific works are full of inaccuracies. King James found in this defect of his Chancellor the matter for a witticism: 'De Minimis non curat lex.' [The law cares not for trifles.]"

In his Notes for a Conference with Buckingham, Bacon gracefully accepts the joke, in these words: "You know the King was wont to do me the honor as to say of me de minimis non curat lex; if good for anything for great volumes. I cannot thridd needles so well."