vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the
wisest are not always free. It may be, that they shrink from the
reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but
as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution. In rosy youth, while yet the
brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven's own tint, and the dark tresses
turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the
throbbing of a heart at ease. "So like, so very like, is day to
day,"--one primrose scarce more like another. Whoever saw their first
grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without
a sigh or a tear, a momentous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the
soul, a thought that youth is flown for ever? None but the blessed few
that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the
shedding of their vernal blossoms, a promise that the season of immortal
fruit is near. It is a frailty, almost an instance of humanity, to aim
at concealing that from others, of which ourselves are painfully
conscious. The herculean Johnson keenly resented the least allusion to
the shortness of his sight. So entirely is man a social animal, so
dependent are all his feelings for their very existence upon
communication and sympathy, that the "fee griefs," which none but
ourselves are privy to, are forgotten as soon as they are removed from
the senses. The artifices to which so many have recourse to conceal
their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves,
than to impose on others. This aversion to growing old is specially
natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless. The borrowed
curls, the pencilled eyebrows,

"The steely-prison'd shape,
So oft made taper, by constraint of tape,"

the various cosmetic secrets, well-known to the middle ages, not only of