He was of old Pythagoras’ opinion
That green cheese was most wholesome with an onion;
Coarse meslin bread, and for his daily swig,
Milk, butter-milk, and water, whey and whig:
Sometimes metheglin, and by fortune happy,
He sometimes sipped a cup of ale most nappy.

(I have looked up “metheglin,” and I find it to have been a “strong liquor made by mixing honey with water and flavoring it, yeast or some similar ferment being added, and the whole allowed to ferment.” “Ale” was also a liquor, but made from malt. “Nappy” means heady and strong: “Nappie ale,” says an old writer, was “so called because, if you taste it thoroughly, it will either catch you by the nape of the neck or cause you to take a nappe of sleepe.” The use of these drinks, it may still be argued, shortened Parr’s life; but the fly-research that I have mentioned seems to indicate that their tendency to decrease physical activity by inducing “nappes” may have materially helped him to conserve his inheritance of longevity.)

But these cases are exceptional, and for my part I have no desire to be the Thomas Parr of the twentieth or twenty-first century. It is more important to live right (and there, indeed, is a job for anybody!) than to live long; and old age, like young love, is often oversentimentalized. Mr. Boswell, I think, oversentimentalized it when he asked his long-suffering friend, “But, sir, would you not know old age?... I mean, sir, the Sphinx’s description of it—morning, noon, and night. I would know night as well as morning and noon.” And the doctor restored the subject to its proper place when he answered: “Nay, sir, what talk is this? Would you know the gout? Would you have decrepitude?” He might, indeed, have gone further. “Do you suppose, sir” (he might have added), “you will know night when you see it? Why, sir, what does a baby know about morning?”

So with Pantaloon: we comparative youngsters have only an external and objective idea of him—his slippers, his stockings, his peevish and morose humors, his feeble mirth and empty garrulity. What living is really like to him we cannot know until we are pantaloons ourselves, and then, mayhap, we shall have forgotten what living is like to us now; let it suffice that we shall probably be far less bothered by our shrunk shanks and piping voices than we now believe possible. At the same time, it will do no harm for some of us to “watch our step.” Already I—and there must be many another like me—am sometimes a little peevish and a little morose; a mere soupçon reasonably explainable by natural causes—but there it is! I am hardly aware of it myself. Yet when it is called to my attention by those nearest and dearest to me, I experience an odd, perverse inclination to be more peevish and more morose than before. I enjoy, I take a queer, twisted, unnatural, hateful, demoniac pleasure, like Mr. Hyde when Dr. Jekyll turned into him, in the idea of being more peevish and more morose. Here indeed is something to look out for: resist that inclination, and we are laying the foundation of a serene and respected old age; obey that impulse, and we comfort the Devil, and run the risk of some day becoming, not only old men, but old nuisances. I do not know, though I very much doubt, that one old fly is ever more peevish and morose than another old fly; but with mankind, whose superior intelligence so often makes trouble for his associates, the variations are visible. Savages, unhampered by the conventions of an artificial civilization, have efficiently knocked their elders on the head in consequence.

Let us, then, do our best to beat the Devil, and prepare for that Indian summer, which, with all respect to Shakespeare, is the true sixth age of man. And they reach it best (to judge by some who have got there) who do their daily work with a good conscience, share their incidental joys with others, and meet their troubles in the spirit of that stout old seaman, Sir Andrew Barton, as I the other day saw his ballad quoted with reference to R. L. Stevenson:—

A little Ime hurt, but yett not slaine;
Ile but lye downe and bleede a while,
And then Ile rise and fight againe.

VII
THE OLDE, OLDE, VERY OLDE MAN

Now concernynge the Soule, it is a Queer Thynge consydering that it lives in the Bodie yett dieth nott; and so I conclude that the Soule was made separate, and thys Bodie for its brief use and tenement; and how it gets in and gets oute I cannot tell you. And belyke there bee all sortes and condiciones of Soules, some goode, some bad, some so-so; but because Goode is better than Evil, and because they lyve in Eternity, the bad Soules will finde itt oute in time, and become goode; and the so-so Soules will learn wisdome, and cease of their foolishnesse. But why they were nott alle made alyke to start, that I cannot tell you; nor juste how they was made.—The Sage’s Owne Boke.

It was a poetess, I am glad to say, and not a poet, who wrote the once popular lines:—