Optimum obsonium labor senectuti.

Make ample provision for old age. Chi in prima non pensa, in ultimo sospira, who does not think before, sighs after, therefore, Make hay while the sun shines. Lay up against a rainy day, and Take care to feather your nest while young, for Non semper erit æstas, it will not be always summer; and it is as disgraceful for young persons to neglect the means of improving their fortunes, as it is for the aged to be over solicitous about increasing theirs. Diogenes being asked what he considered as the most wretched state of man, answered «an indigent old age». This seems to have been said with too little consideration. Poverty is generally and not undeservedly esteemed an evil, and the averting it affords the most powerful incentive to action, but the pressure of it must be much less felt in age, than in the vigour of life. Among the ancients, indeed, age was itself esteemed an evil, as it incapacitates from making those excursions, and following those pleasures which contribute so much to the felicity of the early part of our lives. But if with the capacity for enjoying, we lose the propensity or desire for having them, it should rather be considered as a blessing. By losing them we attain a state of calm and quiet, rarely experienced by the young, neither would it indeed be suitable to them, the passions and desires being the gales which put them in motion, and lead them to signalize themselves. Without them they would become torpid, and would do nothing useful to themselves, nor to the public. Action therefore is the element of the young, as quiet and retirement is of the aged. If life has been passed innocently, and the aged have not to reproach themselves with having deserted their duty, or with the commission of any crime for which they ought to blush, the reflection on their past conduct, and on such acts of beneficence and kindness they may have performed, or of any thing done by which the community may eventually be benefited, will abundantly compensate for what time has taken from them. The aged will also have learned among other things, if it should happen to be their lot, to bear poverty with composure. If little should now remain to them, their wants will also be equally few. The plainest and simplest diet, clothes, and apartments, may very well serve them, and are, perhaps, the best suited to their state. The old man, therefore, if his poverty is not the effect of vice, or folly, will soon accommodate himself to his situation. But if he has been himself the author of his degradation, he will regret and pine, not so much at the loss of that affluence which he no longer wants, as at the vices or follies which occasioned the loss of them. Old and infirm people should continue to exert themselves in all matters regarding their persons, as much, and as long as they can, and they generally may do this, nearly to the period of the extinction of their lives, if they early and resolutely resist that languor, which feebleness is apt to induce. While they shew this species of independance, they will retain the respect of those who are about them. A total imbecility and incapacity to perform the common offices of life, is the most miserable state to which human nature can be reduced.