THE DREAD OF OLD AGE.—We all of us, or at least all of us who are slipping past fifty, secretly dread old age, and regard with aversion its usual, or traditionally usual, conditions; and the sight of a man about whose years there can be no question, who has passed by thirty years the average limit of human life, and by ten years an extreme limit, and yet talks well, hears fairly well, sees perfectly well and could walk like another but for weakness, is pleasantly reassuring. If the man of a century can be like Sir Moses Montefiore, the man of ninety may be only a little indolent, the man of eighty hale and hearty, and the man of seventy retain “the fullest vigor of his faculties.” That is one secret, we are convinced, of the decided popularity of very old statesmen, and especially old statesmen of great vigor, a sense among the middle-aged that if they who are so visible can be so strong and active and full brilliancy, old age cannot be so dreadful after all. An apprehension has been removed or lessened, and a very keen one. Some of the dread no doubt is traditional, founded upon boyish recollections, and even upon books, Shakespeare in particular having expressed, in lines which have stuck in the national memory, an unusually strong sense of the infirmities of age. His celebrated lines were probably accurate at the time, for they are accurate now when applied to certain classes of the very poor; but they no longer describe the majority of the aged well-to-do. Whatever the cause, whether improved sanitary appliances, or greater temperance, or, as we should ourselves believe, an increase of the habit of persistently using the mind, and consistently taking interest in events, it is certain that the disease called senility is among the fully-fed much rarer than it used to be. The old lose their hearing, and their activity, and part of the keenness of their sight, and are supposed to be grown duller alike to pleasure and to pain; but they much seldomer become totally blind, or fatuous, or unable to control their features, or incapable of guiding themselves about. Men of eighty-four or five, who, in the early part of the century, would have fallen into second childhood—then a disease recognized not only by doctors, but by all men, and regarded as a sort of idiotcy—now talk easily, and glide over little deficiencies of memory, and are, apart from a not ungraceful physical weakness, truly men. The younger generation has, however, scarcely realised the change in its full extent, and fears age, therefore, unconsciously a little more acutely than it should, though it has reason for some of its fear. The lot of the old is not the happiest, even if they are fortunately placed. They suffer from the certainty that such physical ills as they have cannot be cured, and a fear that they will become worse, from a deficiency, not so much of occupation as of imperative occupation, the business occupation of