In his later discourses he tells us that although naturally of a very choleric disposition he entirely subdued it. He corrects the notion that the old must eat much to keep their bodies warm; says as old age is a disease we must eat less, as we do when ill; refutes the maxim “a short life and a merry one” and the fallacy that one cannot much prolong or shorten life by regimen; tells us exactly what foods he prefers--soup, eggs, mutton, fowl, fish, etc. At ninety-one he says, “The more my years multiply, the more my strength also increases,” and he preaches an earthly paradise after the age of eighty; while at ninety-five he writes that all his faculties “are in a condition as perfect as ever they were; my mind is more than ever keen and clear, my judgment sound, my memory tenacious, my heart full of life,” and his voice so strong that he has to sing aloud his morning and evening prayers. He enjoys two lives at the same time, one earthly and the other heavenly by anticipation. As Cornaro advanced in years he grew very proud of his age, and his four discourses give us the impression that regimen and hygiene were his true religion, although he was very pious according to the standards of his age. His diet, the houses he built to live in for each season, his charities, the public works he instituted, and even the friends he cultivated, like everything else he said and did, were determined largely by what he thought were their effects upon his physical and mental health. No young man or young woman was ever prouder of his youth than he of his age. He gloried in it as manhood and womanhood do in their prime, and no evangelist was more intent on convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment than he was in exhorting men to change their mode of life to make it more sane, temperate, and abstemious--and that in a day and land when gluttony and riotous living were rife. For him a feast, rich repast, or a formal dinner was suicidal; and so were late hours, irregularities, excitement, and every form and degree of excess. So superior is senescence to all the other stages of life that he believed men should be dominated from the first by the desire to attain it as the supreme mundane felicity, because no one can be truly happy but the old. His mission was evidently to be the apostle of senescence. True, he repeats himself, is often very platitudinous, no doubt, like most old men, greatly overestimates his powers, and if a poor and ignorant man would have been, very likely, a tedious old dotard. But as it is, his treatment of the problem of life is of great and lasting significance.