Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an age which for many years (if I live) I shall be able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that the talk of these three imaginary interlocutors of his upon youth, and the feeling that colours it, convey more of the truth about old age than does Cicero's admired treatise on that subject or any of its descendants. For these treatises start with the false postulate that age is concerned about itself, whereas it is the mark of age to be indifferent about itself, and this mark of indifference deepens with the years. Nor did Cicero once in his _De Senectute_ get hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian lets fall almost casually--that a man should honour an aged parent as he would the image of a God treasured up and dwelling in his house. The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, differs little, if at all, from Mr Meredith's as you may see for yourself by turning back to the September chapter and reading the part from "Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith," through to the excerpt from 'Lucifer in Starlight'. Speaking as a parent, I say that this outlook is--I won't say the right one, though this too I believe--the outlook a man _naturally_ takes as he grows older: naturally, because it is natural for a man to have children, and he who has none may find alleviations, but must miss the course of nature. As I write there comes back to me the cry of my old schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, protesting from the grave-- "But when I think if we must part And all this personal dream be fled-- O, then my heart! O, then my useless heart! Would God that thou wert dead-- A clod insensible to joys or ills-- A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!" I hear the note of anguish: but the appeal itself passes me by. 'All this personal dream' must flee: it is better that it should flee; nay, much of our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But we can continue in the children. I think that perhaps the worst of having no children of their own is that it makes, or tends to make, men and women indifferent to children in general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of childless men and women reach out (as it were) wistfully, almost passionately towards the young. Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, regard them as nuisances, and yet regard themselves as patriots--though of a state which presumably is to disappear in a few years, and with their acquiescence. I own that a patriotism which sets up no hope upon its country's continuous renewal and improvement, or even upon its survival beyond the next few years, seems to me as melancholy as it is sterile.