Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
cases out of ten, it is not so much that the young
people do not know, as that they do not choose.
There is something irreverent in the speculation,
but perhaps the want of power has more to do with
the wise resolutions of age than we are always will-
ing to admit. It would be an instructive experi-
ment to make an old man young again and leave
him all his savoir. I scarcely think he would put
his money in the Savings Bank after all ; I doubt
if he would be such an admirable son as we are led
to expect ; and as for his conduct in love, I believe
firmly he would out-Herod Herod, and put the
whole of his new compeers to the blush. Prudence is
a wooden Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Frank-
lin walks with the portly air of a high priest, and
after whom dances many a successful merchant in
the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to
cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any consider-
able age, it cannot be denied that he laments his
imprudences, but I notice he often laments his
youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine
intonation.
It is customary to say that age should be con-
sidered, because it comes last. It seems just as
much to the point that youth comes first. And
the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add
that age, in a majority of cases, never comes at all.
Disease and accident make short work of even the
most prosperous persons ; death costs nothing, and
the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle
to the happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed out in
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