over his dinner, and over the vinous beverages
that follow it, that the green wax tapers
multiply themselves unwarrantably by two,
and dance in their sockets indecorously. He
shall be a plain man, enjoying his plain roast
and boiled, his simple steak, or unsophisticated
chop, with an unimpaired digestion, powers
of mastication not to be called in question,
and a frame of mind prompting him to eat
only when he is hungry: to eat in order that
he may live; not to live in order that he may
eat. Yet such a monument of abstemiousness
must consume, if he take that bellyfull
of victuals essential to equable health and
strength, at least two hours a day. He may
or may not use knives and forks, damask
napkins, hubble-bubble finger glasses; he
may or may not call the various meals he takes
for the sustentation of his body, breakfast,
dinner, lunch, snack, tiffin, tea, supper, en cas
de nuit, or what not; but, to the complexion
of this two hours' eating daily, he must come.
Turtle and venison, or " potatoes and point,"
Alderman Gobble, or Pat the labourer, my
man eats two hours per diem. There you
have six years more, by which to thin the
threescore and ten years.

More years to take: more minute strokes
to efface from the dial of the watch of life.
Love! Ah me! when you and I and all of
us can remember how many entire days arid
weeks and months we have wasted over that
delusion, how callous and unsympathising
must seem a minute calculation of the space
love mulcts man's life of. A summer's day
over a pink ribbon; hours of anguish over
a crossed t in a love letter; days of perplexity
as to whether that which you said
last night would be taken in good part, or
indeed, as to whether you said it at all; are
these to be taken for nought? They shall
count for nothing on my man's chronometer.
He shall not waste in despair, or die because
a woman's fair. He shall just catch love as
one might catch the typhus fever, and be
"down " with that fever for the usual time,
then grow convalescent and " get over it,"
and forget that he ever was ill. A month for
that. Yet my man, without being inflammatory,
is mortal. Besides his first hot love-fever,
it is but natural to mortality that he
should feel, at certain periods during the
seventy years he runs his race in, the power
of love again; not hot, strong, ferocious, rival-hating
hearts-and-darts love, but love, the
soft, the tender, the prolegomena of domestic
joys—of singing tea-kettles, and cats purring
by the kitchen fire; not the love for black
eyes and ruby lips and raven hair, but the
love that makes us listen for a voice, that
takes us four hundred miles to hear a word
—to dwell upon a look—to press a hand that
never can be ours. Such love—if my man
feel as most of us do—will take him at least
one hour a day. Add to that, the month for
the first raging love-typhus, and you have
three years more to take from seventy.

I hope I have not exaggerated this average
—this common man—not denying as I do that
there be some stony-hearted men in the
world, some impervious cynics, who set their
faces against love as they would against
Popery. It must be remembered, too, in support
of my hour a day, that all lovers are
intolerable prattlers, and that a major part
of the daily hour of love would be consumed
in purposeless gabble—that unknown tongue,
which only the professor of Fonetics, called
Cupid, can expound.

Few men are so "accursed by fate," so
utterly desolate, as not to possess some friends
or acquaintances. A man may have associates
with whom he may cultivate the
choicest flowers of the heaven-sent plant, friendship;
or, he may simply have pot companions,
club friends, or business acquaintances. Still,
he must know somebody, and, being by
nature a talking animal, must have something
to say when he meets his fellow men. I do
not wish to exempt my man from the
common rule. He shall be gregarious, like
his fellows. He shall be no misanthrope
—neither a ceaseless chatterer, nor a stock-fish
of taciturnity. He shall talk in season, saying
only good and sensible things—not holding
men by the button, unnecessarily, in the open
street; not telling them futile stories of the
Peninsular war; hazarding imbecile conjectures
about the weather, the ministry,
or the state of Europe; nor detailing his
grievances, his ailments, or the tribulations
of his family, out of proper time and place.
Yet, I will defy him to consume less than one
hour per diem in talking. This gives me three
years more to deduct from the seventy of my
man's life.

I have already conceded my man to be a
pattern of sobriety, regularity, and morality.
No fast man shall he be, entering at all sorts
of hours, with his coat pockets full of door
knockers and champagne corks; pouring the
minor contents of the coal-scuttle into the
boots of his neighbours, or winding up his
watch with the snuffers. He shall avoid
casinos, select dancing academies, free-and-easies,
"assaults of arms," and harmonic
meetings. He shall never have heard of the
Coal Hole; and the ghastly merriment known
as " life in London " after midnight, shall be as
a sealed book to him. Yet he must amuse
himself sometimes. " All work, and no play,
makes Jack a dull boy." Perhaps my man
belongs to a literary and scientific institution;
perhaps he attends Mesmeric lectures, or is
present at expositions of the " Od force;"
perhaps he sits under my humorous and
accomplished friend Mr. John Parry, or
joins in the sturdy choruses with which
Mr. Henry Russell delights "to entertain his
audience. Or, he may have a fancy for Thursday
evening lectures at his chapel; or for
chemistry, and burning holes in the carpet
and furniture with strong acids; or for Sadler's
Wells Theatre, or for Doctor Bachhoffner and