people’s activity. Whether with little or much wear and tear, he had a long old age, unspoiled by decay of body or mind. He had no more to do with second childhood than those we have mentioned, or than those of his contemporaries who are still active in the service of their country.
The first that will occur to all minds is, of course, the Prime Minister. I am myself so tired of reading the incessant remarks—not altogether considerate to Lord Palmerston’s own feelings,—on the marvellousness of his being still as clever and serviceable as ever at seventy-nine, that I shall not enlarge upon the case. It speaks for itself; it may confirm some inferences yielded by the whole class of cases; and it is a fact of strong and peculiar interest far beyond the bounds of our own empire; but it ought not to be considered miraculous by us who saw Nesselrode as he was last year, and Lyndhurst as he was last month;—the one thirteen, and the other twelve years older than Lord Palmerston is now. Two of his political contemporaries remain,—one active, the other passive, as far as public life is concerned. Lord Brougham is the active one, of course; and at the recent Social Science Congress he observed that Lord Glenelg and himself were the only survivors of their generation of members of the Speculative Society. Lord Glenelg is eighty; and that he should have lived so long is the more remarkable from his being a twin, the survivor of his twin brother Robert by many years. We do not forget him; but we hear nothing of him. As for Lord Brougham, he speaks for himself so abundantly that I may leave him to that description. There is one more remarkable statesman, who appears, at seventy-five, as able as he ever was to guide and shape the fortunes of rulers and their dominions and people. Men must be old themselves to remember the interest of the first clear disclosures of the ability of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe,—Canning’s cousin,—in the field of diplomacy. When he reached his threescore years and ten, he came home from the East,—but not to be wrapped in cotton-wool and set down by the fireside, but to render in parliament services on Eastern questions which no other man is competent to render. May he be there to do this till Eastern questions become better able to take care of themselves!
This name—Stratford Canning—brings up some melancholy associations with the theme of longevity among statesmen. What two men were his relatives,—George Canning and his son, the late Lord Canning! And they were laid in the grave prematurely while many, infinitely less precious to the country, are living on, prosperously and gaily! The father was worried out, and the son worn out of life. They are more like the statesmen of the last century than those whom we see old, and growing old, in office. They remind us of some of the conditions of longevity in their special class, and help us to understand some of the laws of it.
Nothing is clearer than that a habitual activity of brain,—and especially of the intellectual organs of it,—is a leading condition of the most substantial kind of health. All the evidence in connection with longevity, gathered from every class, confirms this. As a rule (which will have fewer exceptions as time passes on), other circumstances being anything approaching to equal, the ablest men in any intellectual career will live the longest. Habitual, strenuous, equable exercise of the faculties requisite for the work is the primary condition of a working longevity. Either included in this condition, or regarded separately, as each may prefer, is the condition of temperance. It is included in the other because there can be no strenuous, and no equable exercise of the intellect when any sort of intemperance is indulged in. Temperance is simply doing or taking only what agrees with one: and to take or do anything which disagrees with one, is simply disordering the brain, and rendering a thoroughly healthy action of it impossible. All this is plain enough: but next follows that pathetic certainty to which we must refer so many of our disappointments, and premature losses of noble public service and glorious public servants. Strong moral emotions are incompatible with durable vigour,—probably in every walk of life, and certainly in that of statesmanship. Men of keen general sensibility, men of anxious ambition, or sensitive honour, or, above all, of delicate conscience, can be statesmen only under the hardest conditions,—those of a living martyrdom and an early death,—unless the latter is precluded by the worse doom of political extinction. Life is sorely wearing to the man of tender conscience in the very stillest of the world’s paths, where the responsibilities are fewest and plainest. Life strains the brain and fibre of the Man of Feeling wherever it finds him. What must be the wear and tear of statesmanship to the man who carries the poet’s nature into such a function! He is under the incessant, conscious burden of millions of human lives which depend on his counsels and decisions, and of the national honour and existence which will stand or fall by his sufficiency or failure. Most of us know something of the probation of an anxious or dissatisfied conscience. If our suffering is keen, what must his be who cannot but make mistakes occasionally, and who can perceive, on looking back, a great sum of mischiefs and miseries which might, perhaps, have been spared by greater wisdom, intellectual or moral, on his part!
The wonder is,—not that statesmen of a high order die early, but rather that they can live under such a strain of emotion. The world may say (as it seems to the world) that such a man dies of hard work. The real truth is, in such cases, that the work would not have been fatal if there had been an unwounded spirit to support it. It is the inward pain which gives its deadly quality to mere fatigue. The Cannings, father and son, were men of this delicate moral organisation: and both sank under their burden,—of irritation, of responsibility, and of fatigue. “Pitt’s heart was broken,” all men say now. It would not have killed him to pass through the probation of 1805 if he had not violated the second condition,—of temperance in all things: but it was moral emotion which rendered life impossible to him when only half of his natural term had run out. An affecting example of the exhausting effects of a painful sensibility has been before the