Charles Sayle (1864-1924) was a poet as well as a bibliographer and librarian at Cambridge University. He edited a three-volume edition of Sir Thomas Browne's works and catalogued the seventeenth-century books at St. Johns College, Cambridge. In his Preface, Sayle thanks famous diagnostician Sir William Osler for his encouragement and quotes him on pp. 83-84: "My second fixed idea is the uselesness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age." The quote, however, was not from Aequanimitas, as stated on p. 84, but from a 1905 speech. By 1916, Osler could write in a letter to J. Collins Warren: "For 60, he has taken my rude remarks. Heavens! that was a long time ago!" (Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler, II:545). Osler inscribed this copy on a front endpaper, probably to a former student, as he often sent his accolytes books as Christmas gifts. An assemblage of quotations for each year in a man's (and occasionally a woman's) life, the volume contains wisdom from Shakespeare, Punch Magazine, Izaak Walton, Byron, Jonathan Swift, The Bible, Plato, Walt Whitman, and many more. Look up any age from Infancy to 12,960,000 and absorb the wisdom. Perhaps at 51, you should be writing your autobiography, as did Gibbon.
