And they whose high examples youth obeys, 309 Are not despisèd, though their strength decays; And those decays (to speak the naked truth, Though the defects of age) were crimes of youth.

The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a serious and distressing matter.

Hor. Mr. SPECTATOR, I am now in the Sixty fifth Year of my Age, and having been the greater Part of my Days a Man of Pleasure, the Decay of my Faculties is a Stagnation of my Life.

In Kinmel Park, Denbighshire, is an oak tree, which, twenty or thirty years ago, lost one of its largest branches by the wind, and a partial decay was the consequence; a key from a neighbouring sycamore fell into the fracture, which, vegetating, has formed for the old mutilated oak a new head.