LXX
‘Man is in no haste to be venerable.’ At present, it seems as if there were no occasion to become so. People die as usual; but it is not the fashion to grow old. Formerly, men subsided and settled down into a respectable old age at forty, as they did into a bob-wig, and a brown coat and waistcoat of a certain cut. The father of a family no longer pretended to pass for a gay young fellow, after he had children grown up; and women dwindled, by regular and willing gradations, into mothers and grandmothers, transferring their charms and pretensions to a blooming posterity; but these things are never thought of now-a-days. A matron of sixty flaunts it in ‘La Belle Assemblée’s dresses for May:’ and certainly M. Stultz never inquires into the grand climacteric of his customers. Dress levels all ages as well as all ranks.