CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



the heart of the young a fierce passion — in the heart 

 of the old a passion still, but subdued and tamed 

 down, without, however, being much dulled or dead- 

 ened, by various experience of all the mysteries of the 

 calling, and by the gradual subsiding of all impetuous 

 impulses in the frames of all mortal men beyond 

 perhaps threescore, when the blackest head will be 

 becoming grey, the most nervous knee less firmly knit, 

 the most steely-springed instep less elastic, the keenest 

 eye less of a far-keeker, and, above all, the most boil- 

 ing heart less like a caldron or a crater — yea, the 

 whole man subject to some dimness or decay, and, 

 consequently, the whole duty of man like the new 

 edition of a book, from which many passages that 

 formed the chief glory of the editio princeps have 

 been expunged — the whole character of the style 

 corrected without being thereby improved — just like 

 the later editions of the Pleasures of Imagination, 

 which were written by Akenside when he was about 

 twenty-one, and altered by him at forty — to the ex- 

 clusion or destruction of many most splendida vitia, 

 by which process the poem, in our humble opinion, 

 was shorn of its brightest beams, and suffered disas- 

 trous twilight and eclipse — perplexing critics. 



Now, seeing that such pastimes are in number 

 almost infinite, and infinite the varieties of human 

 character, pray what is there at all surprising in your 

 [2] 



