Elderly Life: Its Characteristics, Needs and Philosophy.

BBOSWELL: Boswell: What I admire in Ramsay is his continuing to be so young. Johnson: Why yes sir, it is to be admired. I value myself upon this, that there is nothing of the old man in my conversation. I am now sixty-eight and I have no more of it than at twenty-eight. Boswell: But sir, would you not wish to know old age? He who is never an old man does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it. Johnson: Nay sir, what talk is this? Boswell: I mean sir, the sphinx's description of it: morning, noon and night. I would know night as well as morning and noon. Johnson: What, sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude? Seeing him heated-I would not argue any further, but I was confident I was in the right.