world is not half so courteous as it used to be
formerly. The civil people, now-a-days, are
satisfied when they are merely silent, and the
non-civil ones seem to regard a bitter speech as
a tonic, and actually think themselves stronger
after they have said an impertinence. If,
however, it be a very hard thing to announce to the
world that we have left off this, that, or t'other,
it is in reality nothing in comparison to the
difficulty of the fact itself.

"Ah! I see you have left off your snuff-box,"
said some one, with the flippancy of him whose
nose never knew " rappee," and he never for a
moment glances at all the pain and suffering of
your sacrifice: the headaches, the fits of absence,
the fidgety restlessness that beset you—the
want of those little halting-places in your reveries
when you took out your box and opened it slowly
—the air of calm you could feign in a moment
of hot argument by the cunning of your
"digitation"—the bland courtesy with which you
could overcome an angry adversary by the offer
of a pinch. He never dreams of all these, nor
of the fifty ingenious devices by which you
arrived at the victory of your self-denial: how
you put salt or pepper into your box—made a
present of it to the gardener— or threw it into
the canal.

Giving up—no matter what—has a smack of
death about it. The object surrendered is left
behind, not to be regained, and the dirge of
"never more" rings through our hearts as we
say farewell.

It is fortunate for us that we take leave of
most of our pursuits in life without knowing it.
The last day we ever followed the hounds—
what a sad day it had been had we felt it to be
a last one, as we stood watching the yelping
pack in the gorse cover. Could we have given
that view-halloa so cheeringly— could we have
taken that post and rail so dashingly—could we
have led through the deep ground laughingly,
challenging the young 'uns to follow us— could
we have charged that yawning brook at the
finish, had we known that it was to be our last
leap of all, till we came to that fence before the
" unknown hunting-grounds?" I am sure and
certain that we could not. I am convinced that
the most heartless fellow that ever lived could
not survive a series of formal leave-takings with
the pleasures that filled his daily existence.
The most stupendous of all human efforts is
abdication. The value of the object surrendered
is purely an individual question. One
man may give up a throne, another may
surrender the delights of turtle. You may say,
I've done with a racing-stud, and my sacrifice
in giving up cribbage be just as great. The
habits which form our resting-places in life's
pilgrimage being taken away, we feel like men
who journey along a road from which the pleasant
benches are removed. Here we were wont
to halt and rest our weary limbs— we find no
seat to welcome us, we must up and onward!
Who knows how weary and how footsore! But
yet, with all this, not hopeless; for as we trudge
onward we still think of that cool bench under
the willow-tree, and look to the turn of the road
to meet it.

There is, however, a consummate philosophy
in knowing how to " give up" well; nor is it
the gift of every man to do it. We all of us
know the importance of leave-taking at the
moment when our absence will be felt as a thing
to regret, before the period of satiety or weariness
has come—before conversation drags, or
wit grows laboured. It is true policy to leave
the battle of society after a grand charge, and
not linger to pick up the wounded or bury the
dead. So be it with our pleasures. Let us quit
them in the full blaze of their enjoyment, and
not steal away ungracefully from the blackened
embers.

What a pitiable spectacle is the old fellow
shivering on his snow-white hunter, while his
servant is dismounting to open the gate or
make a gap in the fence! What a graceless
exhibition that pursy old fellow with the bald
head is making in the waltz, just as dreary in
its way as one of the farewell benefits—those
"positively last times"—which have come off
for five succeeding seasons, and will continue
for as many more! As though the whole object
were to efface every memory of a once
excellence, and all the recollection of a talent that
once stirred us to very ecstasy! Why won't
Hamlet shake off his " mortal coil," and that
Casta Diva give up being a Casta Diva, and the
rest of it? Will they not see that it is only
given to prime ministers to be as capable at
eighty as at eight-and-forty, and that the men
who govern their fellows are the only ones that
can defy age?

But there are whole classes of men who
never know when to leave off. Soldiers and
sailors are not of this category, still less are
diplomatists; but judges are, and bishops, and
town physicians, and vergers of cathedrals, and
collegiate dons. I am not going to undervalue
the difficulty of such a sacrifice: it is no small
one. Fancy the judge, for instance, coming
back to the world only as a very old lawyer, or
my lord the bishop nothing more than an
octogenarian vicar—no lawn, no apron, no patronage!
Why is there no sliding scale provided by which
they could glide gradually down, doing a little
less and less, till they sunk into oblivion? The
pleasurable pursuits of life are not such drains
on the human powers as are the arduous duties
of a high employ, and yet one finds how he
danced less at five-and-thirty than five-and-
twenty; he rode less hard at forty than fifteen
years before; and so of skating, and cricket,
and rowing, and the like; and why, if so,
should a judge of nigh eighty be equal to the
work that taxed all his powers when he was
fifty? It is not, surely, because mind and
memory, and wit and judgment, are less given
to wear and tear than bones and ligaments. No,
it is simply that these are of the men who won't
"leave off!"

There is a strange but very common delusion
afloat, that the world needs us exactly in the
proportion that we require the world. This