There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical ones; - I mean the formation of HABITS.An old man who shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clock-work.The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them, to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement.Every man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their brains, have a SYSTOLE and DIASTOLE as regular as that of the heart itself.Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the organic.It is a confession of failure in the highest function of being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view of all existing circumstances.But habit, you see, is an action in present circumstances from past motives.It is substituting a VISA TERGO for the evolution of living force.
When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he must economize force somewhere.Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel, - that is all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to you.Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it wood, or coal, or bread and cheese.A reverend gentleman demurred to this statement, - as if, because combustion is asserted to be the SINEQUA NON of thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely chemical process.Facts of chemistry are one thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness another.It can be proved to him, by a very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that every Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days.But then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it, and save his phosphorus and other combustibles.
It follows from all this that THE FORMATION OF HABITS ought naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age.As for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the experience of the ring.A man is "stale," I think, in their language, soon after thirty, - often, no doubt, much earlier, as gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep their vital fire burning WITH THE BLOWER UP.
- So far without Tully.But in the mean time I have been reading the treatise, "De Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely performance.The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to his friend T.Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two or three years older.We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural instinct, - provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.
Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue.A good deal of it is what would be called in vulgar phrase "slow." It unpacks and unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole.I think ancient classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.
An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans.As the patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit with his hands in his lap.Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.
He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the weary hour.I remember only three, -Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and WATTS ON THE MIND.
It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as a lyceum lecture, (CONCIO POPULARIS,) at the Temple of Mercury.
The journals (PAPYRI) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana," -"Tribuinus Quirinalis," - "Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the analysis I intended to make.
IV.Kal.Mart.....
The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended by the ELITE of our great city.Two hundred thousand sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house.The doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (ILLOTUM VULGUS,)who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (GLADIO JUGULATI).The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq., - the subject Old Age.Mr.T.has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by some to be derived.As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (TOGA) was of cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress and manner (HABITUS, VESTITUSQUE) were somewhat provincial.