"
(16) Maria Edgeworth, 'Memoirs of R. L. Edgeworth,' ii. 94.
(17) A friend of Lord Palmerston has communicated to us the following
anecdote. Asking him one day when he considered a man to be in
the prime of life, his immediate reply was, "Seventy-nine!"
"But," he added, with a twinkle in his eye, "as I have just
entered my eightieth year, perhaps I am myself a little past it."
(18) 'Reasons of Church Government,' Book II.
(19) Coleridge's advice to his young friends was much to the same
effect. "With the exception of one extraordinary man," he says,
"I have never known an individual, least of all an individual of
genius, healthy or happy without a profession: i.e., some regular
employment which does not depend on the will of the moment, and
which can be carried on so far mechanically, that an average
quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are
requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure,
unalloyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight
as a change and recreation, will suffice to realise in literature
a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of
compulsion.... If facts are required to prove the possibility of
combining weighty performances in literature with full and
independent employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon, among
the ancients--of Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or (to refer at
once to later and contemporary instances) Darwin and Roscoe, are
at once decisive of the question.
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