An impressive parallel may, indeed, be drawn between these two childhoods--the first a period of dependence upon its elders, and the second of dependence upon its youngers, and each, to the reflective observer, a pretty evenly balanced reversal of the other. It is as if, in the beginning, the whole family of recognizable human characteristics, Curiosity, Memory, Affection, Dislike, Ambition, Love, Hate, Good Nature, Bad Temper, and all the rest of them, were moving, one after another, into a new house; and as if, in the end, the whole family, one after another, were leaving an old one. The very youngest and the very oldest men in the world seem equally equipped for living in it--"sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything"; and Baby, a little older, when he goes out in his perambulator is much like ancient Thomas Parr being conveyed to London as a human curiosity in a "litter and two horses (for the more easy carriage of a man so enfeebled and worn with age).... And to cheere up the olde man and make him merry, there was an antique-faced fellow, called Jacke, or John the Foole."
Why, I myself, meeting a baby in a perambulator, have made such antic faces that I might fairly have been called Jacke, or John the Foole, by anybody who saw me, and all to cheere up the younge man and make him merry. A little older yet, the child will run and play, rolling his hoop, spinning his top, enjoying the excitement of tag and hide-and-go-seek; and I dare say that the old man, a little younger than before, would be just as happy with hoop and top (if he were again introduced to them), and would have a grand, good time at tag and hidey-go if he had other old men and old women to play with, and his youngers would let him. I do not mean that he would do any of these things as well as the child; but it would please him as much to do them to the top of his aged bent, though now and then a flicker of remembered convention, which the child has never known and considered, would make him self-consciously abandon these simple pleasures. Even as an old cat, caught trying to catch its tail, will sit up with dignity and pretend that it wasn't.
There was once a custom of including a skeleton, or perhaps a mummy, in the festivity of a banquet, to remind the diners of their mortality, and, for all I know, the after-dinner speakers of the shortness of time; though very likely they soon got used to their silent companion, and took their mortality as lightly as most people do at dinner. An "Olde, Olde, very Olde Man," as a contemporary writer called the unpicturesque human ruin I have just referred to, would, it seems to me, have answered the same purpose, and answered it better. Human nature takes neither the skeleton nor the mummy with continuous seriousness, and proves by its attitude that, if we instinctively fear death at one moment, we instinctively ridicule our fear at another. I have read it argued that man with his clothes on is nevertheless naked,--such arguments seem to amuse the philosophers,--and by the same entertaining process of reasoning we are all skeletons together, though some may worry lest others consider them too fat for romantic admiration. Or, again, to the man who believes that death snuffs him out like a candle, this skeleton at the feast might easily become an urgent reminder that he is still living, and he would most unwisely stuff himself out like a toy balloon while he still had a chance. But your olde, olde, very olde man is a reality: he is both dead and alive; his presence, to say nothing of his table manners, should tend to make each guest regard death as a friend rather than an enemy, and his state of mind and body prove such a warning against pride in either, that even the after-dinner speakers would take notice and modestly shorten their speeches.