If any are disposed to pray for long life and length of days, Juvenal's dark and repulsive picture of old age would effectually banish that desire. One by one the physical and mental powers fail and the man is left but a pitiful wreck of his former self. But suppose his faculties be sound, yet still he must conduct his sons to their burial; must gaze at the pyre of his beloved wife, and of his brother, and on urns filled with what was once his sisters. This is the forfeit laid upon longevity, to pass to old age amid bereavement after bereavement, thick-coming griefs, and one weary round of lamentations, with the garb of the mourner never laid aside. But age brings not alone loss of friends, but in many instances personal suffering and disaster from which one would be mercifully delivered by a more timely death. This, Caius Marius, the great Roman general, found to his cost: That banishment, that jail, Minturnæ's swamps, and the bread of beggary in conquered Carthage, all had their origin in a long life. What happier being in the world than that Roman could nature, could Rome ever have produced, if, after leading round the train of captives amid all the circumstance of war, he had breathed out his soul in glory, when just stepping down from his Teutonic car? As for beauty, foolish indeed is that mother who prays for her son or her daughter that he or she may possess this; for it is the most fatal possession of all. Not even the most rugged training of the old Sabine school of morality can shield the possessor of great beauty from the poisonous, insidious temptations, if not actual violence, of the wicked world. What then? Shall men then pray for nothing? If you will take my advice, you will allow the gods themselves to determine what is meet for us, and suited to our lot; for the gods will give us--not what is pleasant, but what is most befitting in each case. Man is dearer to them than to himself. Urged on by impulse, by blind and violent desires, we pray for a wife, and for offspring; but only they (the gods) know what the children will be, and of what character the wife. Still, if you must make your petition, and must vow a meat offering at the shrine, then pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body; pray for a brave spirit free from the fear of death--a spirit that regards life's close as one of nature's boons, that can endure any toil, that is innocent of anger and free from desire, and that looks on the sufferings of Hercules and his cruel labors as more blessed than all the wantoning, and reveling, and down-couches of a Sardanapalus.