His circle of friends grew throughout the country although no one was more choice in his selection or more outspoken in his opinions. Of old, age was marked by splendor in dress and punctilious stateliness in manner, and art often thus represents it. Each generation, as it passes, gets from its successor much more criticism than sympathy; the heir is not on good terms with the king. “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” No English monarch ever built a tomb for his predecessor. We should thank God that Abraham, Isaac, and David are well dead. It is young men who deal most courageously with the doctrine of immortality; old men have made no contribution to it. They are silent or do not wish to be suspected of cant or hypocrisy, or perhaps fear striking their heads against a stone wall. If there is no immortality it is the great souls who will be most disappointed and the world will be “only the receptacle of a compost heap of the carcasses of an extinct humanity.” A cruel Highland chief shut his rebellious nephew in a dungeon, fed him on salt meat, then let down a cup which on opening contained no water, and left him to die of thirst. The Divine treats us this way if there is no future. Old men develop individuality. They reason less and less about the future and trust reason less. But “beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar,” assured that “no harm from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore.” W. D. Howells[95] said at eighty that he was less afraid of dying than when he was young. Virtues may become faults, for example, thrift may make a miser, his love of gold being more tangible than of greenbacks. It is, indeed, a shame to die rich. We are often young in spots, for example, on a spring morning. Slight acclivities seem to grow up into hills. After too long sitting, for example, in the theater, we realize that we have over-rested. The golden age, he thinks, is between fifty and sixty. Those who have made themselves wanted are still so. Our utmost effort is less. We are not dull, as the young think us because we seem so to them. A reader has exhausted most of the best literature and yet of rereading old books and reading new ones we never tire and have our favorite passages. We should interest ourselves in public questions. It hurts to be always told how young we look. We forget names we were most familiar with and recall them by their uses or perhaps by their foreign equivalents. He thinks old women, however, do not forget words. Tolstoi said that memory is hell and a future state that recalls all would be a bore. Titian outlived 99 and painted to the end. His masterpiece, the bronze doors of the sacristy at St. Mark’s, was done when he was 85. When tired he withdrew to a dark, warm place. John Bigelow in the nineties gave a charming lecture on Dumas. Versus the solitude of old age, the young do often seem dull. We do not help other old men enough. Woman’s sympathy goes far to bridge this interval.