But an abstemious life will drag even the old body along to centenarian limits in a tolerable state of preservation and usefulness.
The foregoing list can be lengthened out with an indefinite number of names, but it is sufficiently long to show what good spirits and an active brain will do to lighten up the weight of old age.

When we contemplate the Doge Dandolo at eighty-three animating his troops from the deck of his galley, and the brave old blind King of Bohemia falling in the thickest of the fray at Crecy, it would seem as it there was no excuse for either physical, mental, or moral decrepitude short of the age of four score and ten." Emperors and Kings, in short, the great ones of the earth, pay the penalty of their power by associate worriment and care.

In ancient history we can only find a few rulers who attained four score, and this is equally the case in modern times.

In the whole catalogue of the Roman and German Emperors, reckoning from Augustus to William I, only six have attained eighty years.

Gordian, Valerian, Anastasius, and Justinian were octogenarians, Tiberius was eighty-eight at his death, and Augustus Caesar was eighty-six.