how
singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred
upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly
in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's. Say
that you have their highest interests at stake whenever you are out of temper
and wish to make yourself unpleasant by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon
these highest interests. Feed them spiritually upon such brimstone and treacle
as the late Bishop of Winchester's Sunday stories. 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 practise 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. True, in
old age we live under the shadow of death which like a sword of Damocles may
descend at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being
rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who live under
Vesuvius, and chance it without much misgiving.
    I once saw a book in which it was maintained that embryos look upon birth
much as we do upon death. No one, indeed, can say that this is not so, no one
can say that we may not have had the most gloomy forebodings about birth and
have forgotten them. Embryos, it was maintained in the book to which I am
referring, hold birth to be a cataclysm - the end of their present life,