DR. CADOGAN. A REMARKABLE CASE OF HEREDITARY LONGEVITY. REMARKS ON THE
ORDINARY TERM OF HUMAN LIFE.
Live well, and then how soon so e'er thou die,
Thou art of age to claim eternity.
RANDOLPH.
Dr. Cadogan used to say that the life of man is properly ninety years
instead of three-score and ten; thirty to go up, thirty to stand
still, and thirty to go down.
Who told him so? said Dr. Dove; and who made him better informed upon
that point than the Psalmist?
Any one who far exceeded the ordinary term, beyond which “our strength
is but labour and sorrow,” was supposed by our philosopher, to have
contracted an obstinate habit of longevity in some previous stage of
existence. Centenaries he thought must have been ravens and tortoises;
and Henry Jenkins, like Old Parr, could have been nothing in his
preceding state, but a toad in a block of stone or in the heart of a
tree.
Cardinal D'Armagnac, when on a visitation in the Cevennes, noticed a
fine old man sitting upon the threshold of his own door and weeping;
and as, like the Poet, he had
—not often seen
A healthy man, a man full-grown
Weep in the public roads, alone,
he went up to him, and asked wherefore he was weeping? The old man
replied he wept because his father had just beaten him. The Cardinal
who was amazed to hear that so old a man had a father still living,
was curious enough to enquire what he had beaten him for: “because,”
said the old man, “I past by my grandfather without paying my respects
to him.” The Cardinal then entered the house that he might see this
extraordinary family, and there indeed he saw both father and
grandfather, the former still a hale though a _very_ aged man; the
latter unable to move because of his extreme age, but regarded by all
about him with the greatest reverence.
That the habit in this instance, as in most others of the kind, should
have been hereditary, was what the Doctor would have expected: good
constitutions and ill habits of body are both so;—two things which
seldom co-exist, but this obstinate longevity, as he called it, was
proof both of the one and the other. A remarkable instance of
hereditary longevity is noticed in the Statistical Account of Arklow.
A woman who died at the age of an hundred and ten, speaking of her
children said that her youngest boy was eighty; and that old boy was
living several years afterwards, when the account was drawn up. The
habit, however, he thought, was likely in such cases to correct
itself, and become weaker in every generation. An ill habit he deemed
it, because no circumstances can render extreme old age desirable: it
cannot be so in a good man, for his own sake; nor in a bad one for the
sake of every body connected with him. On all accounts the appointed
term is best, and the wise and pious Mr. How has given us one cogent
reason why it is so.
“The viciousness of mankind,” that excellent person says, “occasioned
the flood; and very probably God thought fit to drown the world for
these two reasons; first to punish the then living offenders; and next
to prevent mens plunging into those prodigious depths of impiety, for
all future ages. For if in the short term of life, which is now
allotted to mankind, men are capable of being puffed up to such an
insolent degree of pride and folly, as to forget God and their own
mortality, his power and their own weakness; if a prosperity bounded
by three-score and ten years, (and what mortal's prosperity, since the
deluge, ever lasted so long?) can swell the mind of so frail a
creature to such a prodigious size of vanity, what boundaries could be
set to his arrogance, if his life and prosperity, like that of the
Patriarch's were likely to continue eight or nine hundred years
together? If under the existing circumstances of life, mens passions
can rise so high; if the present short and uncertain enjoyments of the
world, are able to occasion such an extravagant pride, such
unmeasurable ambition, such sordid avarice, such barbarous rapine and
injustice, such malice and envy, and so many other detestable things,
which compose the numerous train of vice,—how then would the passions
have flamed, and to what a monstrous stature would every vice have
grown, if those enjoyments which provoked and increased them, were of
eight or nine hundred years duration? If eternal happiness and eternal
punishment are able to make no stronger impressions upon men's minds,
so near at hand, it may well be imagined that at so great a distance,
they would have made no impression at all; that eternal happiness
would have been entirely divested of its allurements, and eternal
misery of its terrors; and the Great Creator would have been deprived
of that obedience and adoration, which are so justly due to him from
his creatures. Thus, the inundation of vice has in some measure, by
the goodness of God, been prevented by an inundation of water. That
which was the punishment of one generation, may be said to have been
the preservation of all those which have succeeded. For if life had
not been thus clipped, one Tiberius, one Caligula, one Nero, one Louis
XIV. had been sufficient to have destroyed the whole race of mankind;
each of whose lives had they been ten times as long, and the mischiefs
they occasioned multiplied by that number, it might easily be computed
how great a plague one such long-lived monster would have been to the
world.”
Reflect, reader upon this extract. The reasoning is neither fantastic,
nor far-fetched; but it will probably be as new to you as it was to
me, when I met with it in Mr. How's Devout Meditations. The
republication of that book is one of those good works for which this
country is beholden to the late excellent Bishop Jebb. Mr.
Hetherington in his very original and able treatise upon the Fullness
of Time, has seen this subject in the same point of view. He says
“Even our three-score and ten years, broken and uncertain as that
little span is, can delude us into the folly of putting death and its
dread reckoning far from us, as if we were never to die, and might
therefore neglect any preparation for the after judgement. But if we
were to see before us the prospect of a life of one thousand years, we
should doubtless regard death as a bug-bear indeed, and throw off all
the salutary restraint which the fear of it now exercises. Suppose our
tendencies to every kind of sinful indulgence as strong as at present,
with the prospect of such lengthened enjoyment and immunity from
danger, and we may easily imagine with what hundred-fold eagerness we
should plunge into all kinds of enormity, and revel in the wildest
licentiousness. But this is the very consummation to which the race of
Adam had reached, when ‘God looked on the earth, and behold it was
corrupt and filled with violence;’ and God determined to destroy the
earth with its inhabitants.”
A remark of Brantome's may be quoted as the curious confirmation of a
pious man's opinion by a thoroughly corrupt one. It occurs in his
Discourse upon the Emperor Charles the fifth. “_Il faut certes
confesser,_” he says, “_comme j'ouy dire une fois à un vieux Capitaine
Espagnol, que si ce grand Empereur eust été immortel, ou seulement de
cent ans bien sain et dispos, il auroit esté par guerre le vray Fleau
du Monde, tant il estoit frappé d'ambition, si jamais Empereur le
fut._”