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A mournful note of interrogation in close and qualifying sequence upon the note of exclamation that went before. In yet another of his sonnets, Hartley designates himself, in graphic phrase,

Untimely old, irreverendly grey.

Byron ended one of some presentation stanzas to Lady Blessington with the avowal at thirty-five, (6 And my heart is as grey as my head." And five years or so before that, he had written of himself,

But now, at thirty years, my hair is grey
(I wonder what it will be like at forty?
I thought of a peruke the other day),

My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I
Have squander'd my whole summer while 'twas May.

How mournfully different in the process, though like in one, and only one, part of the result, to Mr. Tennyson's picture of a life-progress which

-all the train of bounteous hours Conduct by paths of growing powers, To reverence and the silver hair.

D'Artagnan, at his first introduction to Richelieu's presence, and ours, in Vingt Ans Après, has this descriptive touch given him by French fiction's Alexander the Great: "His hair was beginning to be grey, as always happens when life has been too good or too bad, particularly when the complexion is dark." Wordsworth moralizes on the history of one whose

--temples, prematurely forced

To mix the manly brown with silver grey,
Gave obvious instance of the sad effect

Produced, when thoughtless Folly hath usurped
The natural crown that sage Experience wears.

Mrs. Browning, in her vehement invective, from the Casa Guidi windows, against "false Duke Leopold," spares not a side-blow at what was delusive in his premature grey hairs; for

-men had patience with thy quiet mood,
And women, pity, as they saw thee pace
Their festive streets with premature grey hairs:
We turned the mild dejection of thy face
To princely meanings, took thy wrinkling cares

For ruffling hopes, and called thee weak, not base.

Fouché, we are told by the late Earl Stanhope, accounted for the snow-white state of his hair, by saying that he had "slept upon the guillotine for twenty-five years." One can fancy there were in France many heads untimely white, that might have been better off had his slept under the guillotine, early in the first year of those five-and-twenty.

They who had not seen the king in a year's time, writes Clarendon of Charles I. in 1648,—dating from the time of his leaving Hampton Court-found his countenance extremely altered: from the time that his own servants had been taken from him, he would never suffer his hair to be cut: "His hair was al grey, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance, which appeared only by that shadow." When the

woe-worn Mariana, in John Webster's sensationtragedy, upbraidingly asks Bosola, "Am I not thy Duchess?" that subtle schemer replies, in his outspoken way, "Thou art some great woman, sure; for riot begins to sit on thy forehead, clad in grey hairs, twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's.”—“The Duke of Guise is triste," writes home an envoy from Florence to Paris in 1588: "he has lost his wonted gaiety. Scarcely thirty-five years old, he already has white hairs on his temples." And then the Italian envoy sets himself to speculate whether this blanching process is due to disappointment at the frustration of past designs, or to solicitude in the formation of new projects. "Je ne m'étonne pas s'il blanchit," says Michelet, in reviewing past and present causes for the duke's disquiet.

Columbus, in his youthful days, had hair of a light colour; but care and trouble, according to Las Casas, soon turned it grey, and by the time he was thirty years of age, it was quite white. Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject, as Lord Lytton observes in one of his early writings, suspense is the one which most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, we are told, “is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in the face of a convict of five-and-twenty-sufficient to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white." And, indeed, there needs no convict come from the cells to tell us that. Fair lady shall tell us the same from her boudoir, in tuneful

verse: if we read month for year, the verse might

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When Mr. Lockhart rode out to Abbotsford with John Ballantyne in the spring vacation of 1819, his companion warned him of a sad change in Scott's appearance; but the reality was far beyond anticipation. "His hair, which a few weeks before had been but slightly sprinkled with grey, was now almost literally snow-white." Walter Savage Landor breathes a sigh in regard of Southey's discoloured locks:

Alas! that snows are shed

Upon thy laurel'd head,

Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!

The most gracieux compliments may be, and have been, made to heads (particularly if crowned heads) untimely bleached. One of Voltaire's impromptus (faits à loisir ?) is addressed to Maupertuis on the occasion of their "assisting" together at the toilette of Frederick the Great, when old Fritz that should be was yet in the flower of his age, and their atten

tion was drawn by him to the fact of his having des cheveux blancs on his head :

Ami, vois-tu ces cheveux blancs
Sur une tête que j'adore ?
Ils ressemblent à ses talents;
Ils sont venus avant le temps,

Et comme eux ils croîtront encore.

We have seen that Byron more than once adverts in rhyme, and with reason, to his precociously grey head. In another of his poems he refers to what we have called the acute form, as well as the chronic, of those mental agitations which result in white hairs. The prisoner of Chillon commences the story of his life with these words:

My hair is grey, but not with years,
Nor grew it white

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears.

Sir Henry Holland, in one of his medical essays, cites the remarkable case of a robust young German who suffered under various symptoms of cerebral disorder, and who was so severely affected by the continuance of spectral illusions, of a very painful kind, and the associations attending them, "that his hair, in the course of about ten weeks, changed its colour from being nearly black to a greyish white of which latter colour it grew again after being shaved." But suppose the agony involved in the spectral illusion to be acutely intensified, or suppose the robust young German patient to be less robust,

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