Last Wednesday, May 4, 2005 : I have retired.

Is the best antiquity, and which we may with least vanity admire. One whom time hath been thus long a-working, and like winter fruit ripened when others are shaken down. He hath taken out as many lessons of the world as days, and learnt the best thing in it, the vanity of it. He looks over his former life as a danger well past, and would not hazard himself to begin again. His lust was long broken before his body, yet he is glad this temptation is broke too, and that he is fortified from it by this weakness. The next door of death sads him not, but he expects it calmly as his turn in nature; and fears more his recoiling back to childishness than dust. [...] He has some old stories still of his own seeing to confirm what he says, and makes them better in the telling; [...] You must pardon him if he like his own times better than these, because those things are follies to him now that were wisdom then; yet he makes us of that opinion too, when we see him and conjecture those times by so good a relic.

John Earle (1601-65): A Good Old Man (1628), in The Oxford Book of Essays (John Gross, Ed.), Oxford University Press, 1991.

Did you notice that John was only twenty seven

when he wrote A Good Old Man ?