You hold all the trump cards, or if you
do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgement
you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families,
even as did my old friend Mr Pontifex. True, your children will probably
find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much
service to them or inconvenience to yourself.
Some satirists have complained of life inasmuch as all the pleasures
belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle till we are
left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.
To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised
season--delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice
very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting
east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what
we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Fontenelle at the age of
ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said he did
not know that he had ever been much happier than he then was, but that
perhaps his best years had been those when he was between fifty-five and
seventy-five, and Dr Johnson placed the pleasures of old age far higher
than those of youth.
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