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They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth. They confound all the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying octogenarians, perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians. Ahab in the palace, Naboth in the cabinet. Unclean Herod on the throne, consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making. Manasseh, the worst of all the kings of Juda, living longer than any of them.
Kant, Buffon, Goethe, Fontenelle, and Newton were all over eighty. Michael Angelo and Titian lived to eighty-nine and ninety-nine respectively. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation; Hans Sloane, the celebrated president of the Royal Society in London; Plater, the Swiss physician; Duverney, the anatomist, as well as his confrere, Tenon, lived to be octogenarians.
To the last week of his life his ear could catch a child's whisper, and at fourscore years his eyes refused spectacles, although he would sometimes have to hold the book off on the other side of the light, as octogenarians are wont to do.
That this is the real belief of nearly every one of us, and has always been so, our judgment of the conduct of individuals proves. Do we go about the streets giving prizes to octogenarians, or put down to wickedness the early death of a child? Why then, should we otherwise regard long life in a whole people?
Experience shows that all ages fall in love and out again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, "a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will." Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert's elderly baby died a blase old roue of five. Romeo's passion was a second, not a first, love: he had already loved Rosaline.
And he will improve, don’t you think so, Helen? he’s only six-and-twenty yet.’ ‘He may,’ I answered, ‘He will, he WILL!’ repeated she. ‘Excuse the faintness of my acquiescence, Milicent, I would not discourage your hopes for the world, but mine have been so often disappointed, that I am become as cold and doubtful in my expectations as the flattest of octogenarians.’
But he was, no doubt, lusty and vigorous for his years, and ready to smite the Canaanites hip and thigh, and drive them out, and take possession of their land, as he did forthwith, when Moses gave him leave. Grand old men there were, three thousand years ago! But not all octogenarians were like Caleb, the son of Jephunneh.
Such dead as these are innumerable, Enrico; every graveyard contains hundreds of these sainted beings, who, if they could rise for a moment from their graves, would cry the name of a child to whom they sacrificed the pleasures of youth, the peace of old age, their affections, their intelligence, their life: wives of twenty, men in the flower of their strength, octogenarians, youths, heroic and obscure martyrs of infancy, so grand and so noble, that the earth does not produce as many flowers as should strew their graves.
Growing Bulgarian bacilli to make fermented milk that would keep us all perennially amiable while we grew to be octogenarians, was one thing, but when the company, lured by the oratory of a cheese expert, were beguiled into making cream cheese just the sort of cheese that Lucullus and Ponce de Leon both wanted but did not find our troubles began.
The natives of the elder Carcassonne are all humble; for the core of the Cité has shrunken and decayed, and there is little life among the ruins. A few tenacious labourers who work in the neighbouring fields or in the ville-basse, and sundry octogenarians of both sexes, who are dying where they have lived and contribute much to the pictorial effect these are the principal inhabitants.
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