Anno Domini from what we may call a subjective or purely personal point of view. We cannot, for example, picture to ourselves a male being who will deliberately and out of malice prepense go up-stairs, lock his dressing-room door, and sitting down in front of his lookingglass study his features in the glass and note the havoc which length of days has wrought on a countenance once, in somebody's eyes at all events, pleasing to behold. Beau Brummell may, for all we know or care to know to the contrary, have done something of the sort; but we think of Beau Brummell rather as a "very, very pajock," than a man of bones and sinews. Even when we quarrel with nature and resent the fact that our hair and teeth do not last out our time, we do not saddle Anno Domini with the responsibility.

"Delicta majorum immeritus lues." While we may not regard our doctor as invariably and on all points infallible, we thank him for teaching us the thought that in the matter of scanty locks and decayed teeth we are the innocent victims of the excesses of our ancestors, rather than sufferers for our own works and deservings, or even our own ages. On occasions when our hairdresser, who apparently persists in mistaking us for Tittlebat Titmouse and expects us to buy his infallible hair-restorer, favours us with the old stereotyped remark, "Hair getting a little thin on the top, sir," it is a wholesome

and comforting reflection that our great-great-grandfather is to be held accountable because he would drink that extra bottle of port night after night. And when the dentist pulls a long face over the condition of our teeth, we feel sure that our great-great-grandmother either indulged in too many sweetmeats or habitually over-ate herself. We do not in the least degree in the world wish to convey the idea that we grudge the old folk their port wine or their sweetmeats; on the contrary, we hope that they enjoyed them at the time, and were never haunted by the thought that their self-indulgences would be visited on the heads of an unborn posterity. But it is manifestly unfair to credit our dear friend Anno Domini with the disasters which ancestral gluttony has inflicted on modern generations.

We have been assured, and here again our authority is good, that when some old village gossip tells us she means it for a compliment-that we are looking very poorly, she really wishes us to understand that we are looking very old. And probably there are some days on which we both look and feel older than on others. But if left wholly to our own reflections-setting aside, that is, other people's personal remarks-we shall decline to entertain the idea that there is any fixed law of nature that shall compel us to feel one whit older when April Fool's Day comes round again than we do now on these Calends of

indulged himself in that isolation from society which we have heard ladies with HighChurch tendencies describe as a Retreat.

We had occasion to notice that he was sufficiently weatherwise to select for the purpose one of those days which a fisherman's almanac might specify as being good for neither man nor beast. On such a day, wrapped up in a dressinggown before a comfortable fire, he would invite the respectful sympathy of his family, who quite entered into the spirit of the thing and understood that the master of the house expected to be cosseted, posseted, and generally made much of. Brandy - gruel and favourite titbits were administered at seemly intervals, and though we do not remember that straw was laid down in the street or that the doorknocker was muffled, a discreet parlour-maid was careful to whisper her answers to inquiring visitors with all the gravity due to so solemn an occasion.

"It is one of master's bad days, sir, and I am afraid you cannot see him."

The visitor had no cause for being unduly anxious. Experience would have taught him that if the next day was fine and bright the phoenix would rise from its ashes, and a rejuvenated son would gladden the hearts of his countrymen by discarding the dressing-gown and resuming the ordinary garb and habits of a vigorous nineteenth-century Englishman.

Most men, however, seem to view the advance of age from what we may call an objective point of view, critically studying the performances of their elders or contemporaries, and regulating their own line of conduct accordingly. We know one man, for instance, who for years past has never omitted to greet our own appearance in the cricket-field with the same remark, slightly personal, but always well-meant "Awfully glad to see you playing here to-day, old fellow; you know that you are ever so much older than I am. And this puts us upon our mettle at once. For do we not feel that we are for the nonce serving as an object-lesson, and that there is somebody on the ground who is, if possible, even more keenly interested in our success than we are ourselves? And we can go home and sleep the sleep of the just that night, buoyed up by the conviction that while others may have noted our shortcomings, and possibly resented the presence of an old fossil on the side, one man at any rate has been equally ready to observe any redeeming features in our play. There is a species of satisfaction even in the thought that we have one trumpeter surviving; for we know that for months to come he will find in our humble self a precedent for not giving up all semblance of juvenility, and that if any contemporary less energetic than himself ventures to suggest that cricket is a young man's game, an answer will be ready on his tongue.

"Too old to play cricket? What nonsense! Why, I met old What's-his-name playing the other day, and he got a heap of runs, and he's years older than I am."

If the pair of us, the veterans of our side, have been fair subject for criticism on the part of our juniors, how shrewdly in our turn have we watched the performances of the youngsters, half fancying that in our prime we were better men than they are now; sure in our own mind that in the years to come few of them will feel as vigorous as we feel ourselves to-day, sceptical perhaps as to the absolute superiority of young steel over old iron. And if it so happen that by any chance Ulysses, favoured by the goddess, temporarily seems to regain his pristine strength and to bend the bow with more ease than Telemachus, how sweet the triumph, how unbounded the satisfaction to feel that there is some life in the old dog yet? We are both of us on the best of terms with Anno Domini for weeks to come, and so far from feeling oppressed by weight of years, inclined to give ourselves credit for more of them than we are really carrying.

But to reverse the picture, and regard the object-lesson from another point of view. On those bad days which come only too often, when time and everything else seems to be thoroughly out of joint, when the wind blows from the east or the ground is slippery, when the eye is faulty, and the muscles refuse to work pro

VOL. CLXV.-NO. M.

perly, when the catches are dropped and the ball will persist in going between our legs, when, as a climax to our misfortunes, some volatile young gentleman is kind enough to run us out-who so grieved as our trumpeter? In the fall of Hector-this reads rather as if there were two trumpeters, but we must pose as his Hector just for this once he foresees the ruin of Troy, in our discomfiture he recognises his own fate, and that night he goes home very sorry for himself. We will hope that he may find some comfort in the thought that we really, after all, are "years older than he is, and so thinking, may postpone the sale of his bat and pads for a period, at all events.

But Anno Domini has also, from the objective point of view, a sadder tale to tell. Some ten years ago we sat up smoking well into the small hours of the night in the company of an old army man, who had received his commission in or about the year that 'Maga' first saw daylight. Time had dealt kindly with him; he was upright as a dart, in full possession of all his faculties, a brilliant pianist, and a most cheery and interesting companion. Suddenly, in the middle of a story of some

adventure he had met with early in the century, he interpolated, almost by way of apology, "Of course, all those fellows are dead now. devilish odd thing, sir, but you've no idea how many of my contemporaries are dead;

2 A

It's a

quite extraordinary, I call it." And as if the remark had set him thinking, he shortly relapsed into silence, and we got no more stories out of him that night.

On our own shoulders Anno Domini may seem to sit lightly enough, the decay of tissue that must be going on in our bodies may be unaccompanied by any disquieting symptom; but when we watch the narrowing circle of our contemporaries, and miss the faces of those "who have toiled and wrought and fought " with us, we cannot help asking ourselves the question why the one should have been taken and the other left.

"Jam proximus ardet Ucalegon," the blaze, if the wind sets this way, will reach our own hearth next, and there will be yet another gap in the circle. It may be that, as the years roll on, our sense of pain, as of pleasure, grows less acute, and we become, comparatively speaking, callous; but it is only callous, comparatively speaking, after all, and to most of us, as we look round in vain for the old familiar faces, will come home the words in which Kingsley describes the feelings of the Argonauts when they landed on the shores of their beloved Hellas: "And their joy was swallowed up in sorrow while they thought of their youth, and all their labour, and the gallant comrades they had lost." Apart from this, there is yet another way in which Anno Domini is in the habit of forcibly reminding us of his presIt is an old saying that

ence,

us.

we may be thankful that we do not see ourselves as others see Sometimes, however, we come perilously near the brink of so doing. Absorbed in our work or amusements, we are apt to grow, happily, unconscious of the flight of time, and possibly for months together nothing special or untoward occurs to remind us that we are not so young as we were. Then comes a rude awakening. One day we suddenly run up against an old friend whom we have lost sight of for many years.

When we had last met him-alas! a very long time ago we had regarded him as the embodiment of manly strength and beauty, a veritable king of men-one of those marvellous athletes to whom no feat of physical strength and endurance seemed to come amiss. Now he is nothing but a very ordinary mortal: there is absolutely nothing about his appearance to suggest that he was ever at any period of his existence comely to behold. The springy gait has become an ungainly shuffle; instead of the lithe figure which we once admired, we now shudder at a rotundity of form which might awake the envy of Mr Weller senior; the well-favoured face has become muddy - complexioned, and scored with deep lines; when he laughs we see the gaps in the "ivory palace," when he takes off his hat we note the baldness. Even his clothes- and he used to dress so well, and we happen to know that he is not a poor man— are vilely made and vilely put