Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/593

. 14, 1863.] eyes of all of us in the case of O’Connell. If ever there was a frame built for longevity, it was his. Of all the politicians of his time, he seemed the most likely to live to a hundred. But he misled Ireland,—he entangled himself in perilous falsehood,—he was conscious that honour was virtually gone, and that infamy and the curses of a deceived people were in the future, and he was unnerved. Afraid either to live or die, he died of fatal exhaustion from overstrained, painful, and unremitting emotion.

It would seem, then, that if statesmen are to add to their other utilities that of serving their country to a great age, they must not be men of a very acute sensibility, of strong passions, or of a delicate conscience. The conscience must be at least robust; and if it is somewhat more,—rather hard, or blunt, or lax, so much the stronger is the chance of the protraction of their work. They must be men of calm passions and regular habits, generally speaking. If, indeed, an aged statesman is seen whose private life has not commanded respect, or whose egotism has amounted to a passion, involving jealousy and hatred, his old age is hardly a privilege, to himself or anybody else. His intellect may appear untouched; but in fact his judgment has become untrustworthy. It is probably inconsistent in its decisions; and it is certainly warped by his resentments, his exultations, and his mortifications. Though no one may say it, most people feel that he would have been better in his grave long ago, for other reasons than the comprehensive doubt whether old age is a blessing at all.

There was a time within living memory when it was considered desirable that men who were real workers should be permitted and encouraged to retire from their toils at sixty. Of course, no such rule could be universally applicable. One man is younger at sixty than another at fifty; and there are labours which are easier at sixty than at forty. But there was a strong feeling that, generally speaking, parliamentary work, pulpit work, the judicial bench, and the toils of medical practice, were too much for men over sixty. When the painter must have recourse to glasses, when the preacher becomes garrulous, or delivers old sermons, when the county member nods through a debate, when the physician has to refresh his memory about his patients’ ailments from day to day, and when the author puts forth less power from season to season, all faithful and genial friends wish that these sexagenarians were respectably and tranquilly reposing in their own homes, enjoying their leisure while the capacity for enjoyment remains. But the term really seems to have been changed within a generation. We see men of seventy whom we could ill have spared from public life for ten years past; and I do not know that it matters very much what is the age fixed upon, while there is a sort of public opinion established in favour of some term being assigned at which laborious men may be authorised to leave off working, for their own sakes and that of the society they have thus far served so well.

We have seen how some statesmen who might have lived their threescore years and ten died, worn out, far too soon; and to Pitt, Lord Dalhousie, and the Cannings, we might add many names of men in minor offices who worked themselves to death, either in carrying some particular measure, or under the constant pressure of care and toil. There have been others who were snatched from us by accidents. Huskisson followed his friend Canning too soon; but he also was nearly worn out; and he could not have worked much longer if he had been far away from the railroad on that fatal opening day. Our hearts are yet sore from the loss of Peel, at a period when we reckoned on a more dignified public life for him, and a greater wealth of counsel from him for ourselves than even his official career had afforded. In other departments of the public service accident has deprived us of benefits from men who had become old without any perceptible diminution of power. Lord Clyde’s death may be attributed to the fall from his horse in India, of which he made so light; and Sir Cresswell Cresswell’s death cannot be supposed altogether unconnected with the injury which he received in the Park. The one was just past seventy, and the other just short of it; and yet both may be said to have died prematurely.

Arts and Arms seem to be favourable to longevity under the same conditions as statesmanship. Wellington, in whom the two were united, is a remarkable illustration of how toil, responsibility, and the liabilities of fame, may be borne when the moral nature and training are a help instead of a drawback. His strength of will, his power of self-reliance, his simplicity of mind, his unconsciousness of doubt or scruple, and his very narrowness of political view, in combination with his military comprehensiveness of knowledge, enabled him to do and live through what would have killed half-a-dozen men of a more sensitive fibre, and a more egotistical sort of humility. In him, as in Lord Clyde (who might have lived to the age of Wellington), Lord Combermere, who is still alive and vigorous at ninety, the French Marshal d’Ornano, who has just died at the age of ninety-two, Lord Seaton, who has departed this year at the age of eighty-seven, and Sir Howard Douglas, who was a great professional authority and public benefactor till he died two years ago at eighty-five, we see that the toils of military life, and the gravest responsibilities, do not shorten the existence of men constitutionally adapted to that career.

The Church has for some time been becoming a scene of trouble and anxiety, very wearing to its guardians and administrators; yet there are still very old bishops in its modern annals. When a certain bishop died twenty or thirty years ago, at some unheard of age, leaving his diocese in a woeful condition from the long suspension of his personal offices, the Church had hardly begun to awake from its lethargy of the last century; but even then society felt that we must not have such aged bishops, if they were past their work. The late Archbishop of Canterbury was past eighty; the present Bishop of Exeter is eighty-six; and Archbishop Whately has just departed at seventy-six; but all these have so far provided against their duty being neglected that we may admit, without any reserve objection, that the clerical career