Mr. Trollope’s Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he “had no idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak alongside of him,” that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal’s emphatic phrase, old age steals upon us unawares,—unperceived, unrecognised: _obrepit non intellecta senectus_. This stealthy in-coming, or on-coming, of old age is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand with Juvenal, almost word for word: _non intelligitur quando obrepit senectus_. There is Ovid, again, with his “stealthy lapse” of age, beguiling as it wears away: _labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas_; and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless years we grow older till we grow old: _Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis_. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: _Rien n’est pénible à démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose vienne du dehors et coupe court_. There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson’s Will Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long, ere the hateful crow shall tread the corners of his eyes; all the more force as coming from one who has to own of himself— “For I had hope, by something rare, To prove myself a poet; But, while I plan, and plan, my hair Is gray before I know it.” _RESTRAINED ANGER._ PROVERBS xvi. 32. “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” To be ruled by one’s angry spirit is cruel bondage indeed, for that taskmaster never spares the lash. To rule or to be ruled,—that is the question. “Ira furor brevis est: animum rege; qui, nisi paret, Imperat: hunc frenis, hunc tu compesce catenâ.” Marcus Antoninus, in his Meditations, calls rage and resentment marks of an unmanly disposition; mildness and temper being not only more humane, but, he contends, more masculine too. And the philosophic emperor wrote and spoke as one of, what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls, those “... milder natures, and more free, Whom an unblamed serenity Hath freed from passions, and the state Of struggle these necessitate.”