Nay, by managing its own
work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is
doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full,
busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained
and independent age; and the muff inevitably develops
into a bore.
*
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old
age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm
of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self
as well as ignorance of life.
*
The schoolboy has a keen sense of humour. Heroes he learns
to understand and to admire in books; but he is not forward
to recognise the heroic under the traits of any
contemporary.
*
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs
hold their own in theory; and it is another instance of the
same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have
been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances are made
for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for
the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt,
and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when
an old gentleman waggles his head and says: 'Ah, so I
thought when I was your age.' It is not thought an answer
at all, if the young man retorts: My venerable sir, so I
shall most probably think when I am yours.' And yet the
one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a
Roland for an Oliver.
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