FOOLS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IV, Issue 136, 12 June 1869, Page 3

FOOLS.

From the London Leader. A middle-aged foolish man must be older thau 40. The right age is 50. He is then fit for all folly. Give a man of fifty with a strong predilection for acting the fool, and the most enjoyable of all spectacles is provided for you. His appearance matters nothing. If he be ugly, there is vanity to help him on ; if he preserves the good looks of his youth, there ia vanity still. So which ever way you take liim, he is independent of your opinion. A middle-aged foolish bachelor very Boon wins for himself a kind of reputation in society. He will always be found paying attention to some young lady with prospects. Herein is one phase of bis foolishness, that he allows everybody to know that the object of his pursuits is money. And that is why he remains a tacheloi' for so long a period. Girls find him out; his attentions are no compliment to them, but to their means, they feel. Yet they do jiot repel him. He is thought so harmless, and so good-natured that in the absence of a better his arm is esteemed good enough to take, his attentions innocent enough to be received, for the time being. Then again, his whole ■air is so unconsciously humorous that he is a perpetual subject of secret mirth to a girl possessed of the least sense of the ■ridiculous. This makes him an amusing companion. He would no more believe you could tell him that he dyes his •whiskers and moustache than he would "believe that you could guess his age, or at «ll events imagine him to be more than •thirty-eight. Yet he is old enough to be unconsciously fatherly in his manners, and -this peculiarity, blended with an obvious and constant effort after juvenility, renders him singularly droll. If he wears a wig, his determination that you shall not guess it to be a wig makes you suspect it at once. He will twist .nonchalantly the curls of it over his forehead, with just enough nature in the action to suggest at once that the •curls are false. You can always detect his fahe teeth, too. You might not suspect them, perhaps, in another person's mouth ; but somehow or other, in the mouth of the middle-aged foolish man the truth is rendered obvious in a very short time. Then be has a knack of falling away in the right or left leg of his trousers. He would have you believe this to be no more than a habit, •and he always recovers himself with as •graceful -a gesture as he Is master of; but •there is no' misapprehending the sugges■tiveness of weak knees. As he walks about it is almost impossible to help thinking that only half of him as he now 4s, -goes to bed at night, and that he must leave the other half in a chair oear his bedside, or hang it up on pegs in his cupboard. All this is characteristic of the foolish middle-aged man. Yet he is very good-natured, though good natured in a fashion that makes his foolishness more striking. He is always the first to arrive at an evening party; always the last to leave. You will see him down stairs when the carriages., aie announced, busy iu helping young ladies on with their opera cloaks, whispering funny things to them as he inquires whether he shall put the hoods over their heads, accosting the waiters with droll, stupid sentences, in order to ' win & faugh from the women servants who hang about to criticise dresses and to pocket fees. At picnics he is the man who ruins a cherry tart by accidentally sitting -on it; who picks nosegays of buttercups and daisies for the prettiest girl of the party, utterly oblivious of tbe fact that : ihe prettiest girl has a beau by her side, who is secretly wondering what " the old fool's game is," and " what the dooce " he means by this kind-of intrusion. All this may seem very harmless, aud not deserving of the ridicule we say it deserves. As to its harmlessness, Heaven knows we would ' be the last to dispute that; but as to its being deserving of ridicule, we do honestly believe that there cau lie nothing more Absurd in this, world than the foolish middle-aged bachelor; not so much from Individual traits as from the tout ensemble, -so to speak, of his life as it is presented tb us at the period .at which we first fiud ■ himr V •