S.B. from Leeds

For his second talk Mr. Williamson has again chosen a subject that has engrossed writers since literature began - as indeed one of the fundamental facts of human existence must. Old age, in literature, tends on the whole to be grim, as the knowledge that age confers, combined with physical weakness, tends to be terrifying to the young. One can recall countless instances of fearful old age, from the wreck and desolation of King Lear to the ghostly disintegration of Cleopatra in 'Dombey and Son' - though the one instance of aged iniquity that perhaps impressed itself most strongly upon one's mind, as one invariably encountered it at an impressionable age, was the witch Gagool in Rider Haggard's 'King Solomon's Mines.'

There is, of course, merely rakish old age, admirably personified in Thackeray's 'Marquis of Steyne'; there is serene old age, of which Prospero remains the type; and there is pathetic old age, rarely more pathetic than that of Mr. Hugh Walpole's 'Two Old Ladies.' The humours of old age are another matter, and generally on a considerably lower plane. But the sheer horror of age has never been better projected than in Swift's hideous creation, the Studdburgs, those ghostly beings who remind us what a curse to humanity immortality might be.