But if I am getting old, although perhaps prematurely, I must be casting about for the _subsidia senectuti_. Swift wrote to Gay, that these were "two or three servants about you and a convenient house"; justly observing, that, "when a man grows hard to please, few people care whether he be pleased or no"; and adding, sadly enough, "I should hardly prevail to find one visitor, if I were not able to hire him with a bottle of wine"; and so the sorrowful epistle concludes with the sharpest grief of all: "My female friends, who could bear with me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me." It is odd that Montaigne should have hit upon the wine also as among the _subsidia senectuti_; although the sage Michael complains, as you will remember, that old men do not relish their wine, or at least the first glass, because "the palate is furred with phlegms." But I care little either for the liquor or the lackeys, and not much, I fear, at present, for "the female friends." I have, then, nothing left for it but to take violently to books; for I doubt not I shall find almost any house convenient, and I am sure of one at last which I can claim by a title not to be disturbed by all the precedents of Cruise, and in which no mortal shall have a contingent remainder. To books, then, I betake myself,--to books, "the immortal children" of "the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good,--ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance,--books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the Spartan boys sobriety. Montaigne "never travelled without books, either in peace or war"; and as I found them pleasant in happier days, so I find them pleasant now. Of course, much of this omnivorous reading is from habit, and, _invitâ Minervâ_, cannot be dignified by the name of study,--that stiff, steady, persistent, uncompromising application of the mind, by virtue of which alone the _Pons Asinorum_ can be crossed, and the Forty-Seventh Problem of Euclid--which I entirely disbelieve--mastered.