A good and worthy life cannot be detached or wholly useless, because unfinished. When you throw a number of broken rings on the floor, on lifting one you find it casually joined with another, and each, in turn, with many more. So must a man's endeavor co-operate with a predecessor's, and be linked again with some life-work to be ended to-morrow, in beautiful, enduring sequence; though to outward vision all three were but severally a fragment and a failure.
[ON TEACHING ONE’S GRANDMOTHER
HOW TO SUCK EGGS.]
IN the days of the schoolmen, when no vexed question went without its fair showing, it seems incredible that the proposition hereto affixed as a title provoked no labyrinthine reasoning from any of those musty and hair-splitting philosophers. Aristotle himself overlooked it; Duns Scotus and the noted Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de Hohenheim Paracelsus were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even that seventeenth-century English essayist and scholar, "whose understanding was wide as the terrene firmament," neither unearthed the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.
It is reserved, therefore, for some modern inquirer to fix it, for certain, whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, Pythonesses, Sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were theoretical merely, and at what age the grandams (for the condition of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to matriculate themselves in the precincts of this lost art.
It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became idle and enfeebled; whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this new, leisurely, immeasurably mild and genteel trade could be acquired with imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past his nonage, are kittenish and irreverend figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother learning, with melancholy energy, to suck eggs.