railings, and to be talking to one of the junior
ladies, and to see that a flush has passed over
her face, I immediately know without looking
round that a Greenwich Pensioner has gone
past.

WONDERFUL MEN.

ROGER BACON says, he has spoken with
several persons worthy of credit, who knew a
man aged nine hundred years! This man reached
this age by means of a sovereign preservative.
The truth of this fact is established by evidence,
doubt of which is not permissible, for the man
obtained a certificate of the fact, in the year
1200, from Pope Alexis the Third, necessarily
and officially Infallible. The Sibyl Erythrea,
according to Phlegon—De Mirabilibus et
Longævis—lived ten hundred years. Matthew
Paris has recorded, in his History of England,
that Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, was
recognised in this country in the year 1229. Less
strong food for faith than these narratives from
English history may be obtained from the annals
of Portugal. Lopez de Castenada, King of
Portugal, being, in the year 1535, Viceroy of
India, a man was brought to him, who, it was
proved by testimony, had already lived three
hundred and thirty-five years. This tercen
tenarian had renewed his youth several times
from hoary age, and had thrice changed his hair,
his teeth, and his complexion. His name was
Hugo de Acuna. A physician, who felt his pulse,
testified that he had all the vigour, as he had
the black hair and black beard, of a young man,
in his three hundred and thirty-fifth year. If
we could but get back this lost secret of growing
young again, we all might have the pleasure of
believing in Acuna, Erythrea, and Cartaphilus!

Meanwhile, we may turn to personages whose
longevity is of less difficult belief, although taxing
credulity very heavily. A dozen persons
might be picked out from the pages of serious
authors on Longevity, whose united ages would
equal the eighteen hundred and sixty-three years
of the Christian era. It is, indeed, recorded
that one Mac Cream died in England in 1696,
aged two hundred. However deficient this
group of cases may be in satisfactory proofs,
there is no scientific improbability connected
with them. The Science of Life knows nothing
of any sovereign preservative of youth, or of
any elixir for making the old young, but it
compares the periods of gestation, of growth in
height, and in breadth, and of decay among the
mammals, and concludes that man is a mammal
built to last some ninety or a hundred years:
and who, in favourable circumstances, may last
there is no saying how long, beyond his natural
term. Physiology, in a word, furnishes no
grounds for doubting the existence of men
of nearly two hundred years. Haller,
Duferand, and Flourens, the authorities on the
subject of Longevity, indeed, allege reasons for
expecting their appearance in favourable
circumstances. Thomas Parr may have done penance
in a church porch for a fault of youth in his one
hundred and fortieth year, and died by accident
when he was one hundred and fifty-two; Henry
Jenkins may have led a horse laden with arrows
to the battle of Flodden when twelve years old,
and may have lived through the struggles of
the Reformation and the Revolution, dying at
the age of one hundred and sixty-nine, when
the political constitution which remains to the
present day was finally set up; and Kintigern,
better known as Saint Mungo of Scotland, may
have died when one hundred and eighty-five
years old. But belief in these and similar
instances of marvellous longevity, is only a pleasing
exercise of imagination which is not forbidden
by any warnings of scientific improbability.

When public honours have been paid to
centenarians of this category, there is some excuse
for credulity. Parr lies in Westminster Abbey.
Jenkins was buried by national subscription.
The poor old woman to whom the Empress-
Queen of Germany paid a visit—no doubt with
an eye to pictorial effect, because her Majesty
heard she was sorry she had become too infirm
to go out to see her sovereign—was probably a
genuine centenarian. Philippe Herbelot was,
it may be believed, one hundred and fourteen,
when, as a centenarian pensioner, he presented
Louis the Fourteenth with a bouquet on his
birthday. "What have you done," asked the
king, " that you have reached so great an age?"
"From the age of fifty, please your majesty, I
have shut my heart and opened my cellar." The
sarcasm was so merited, that if it never were
spoken it ought to have been. In despotic
governments one of the arts of governing is the
art of getting up shows and scenes; and in
France, where the party uppermost has always
been despotic, there have occurred some
theatrical displays of reverence for extreme old age.
On the 23rd of October, 1789, the National
Assembly was sitting with M. Freteau in the
chair, when it was announced that "a man, aged
one hundred and twenty years, wished to see the
assembly which had freed his country from the
bonds of slavery." The Abbé Gregoire proposed
that out of respect for age the members of the
assembly should rise up on his entering: a
proposal which passed with acclamation. The
centenarian was led in by his family, and the
members rose. Amidst great applause he walked
up to an arm-chair in front of the secretaries'
table, and he was requested to put on his hat.
He produced his certificate of baptism, proving
that he was born at Saint Sorbin, of Charles
Jacques and Jeanne Bailly, on the 10th of
October, 1669. He had maintained himself by
his labour, and had fulfilled all the duties of his
station, until he was in his one hundred and
fifth year, when the king gave him a pension of
two hundred livres. The assembly voted him a
contribution; and the author of a plan of
national education suggested that the august
old man should be lodged in the Patriotic School
and waited upon by the pupils of all ranks,
especially by the children whose fathers were
killed in attacking the Bastille. "Do whatever