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That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die by Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton (Audiobook) - Read free for 30 days

That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die by Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton (Audiobook) - Read free for 30 days
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Audiobook  56 minutes
That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die


Written by Michel de Montaigne and Charles Cotton

Narrated by Douglas Harvey
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We all die, sooner or later. We all know it, and we wonder when, where, and how it may happen. and yet we go to extraordinary lengths to put the thought of it out of our minds. We hesitate to bring it up in conversations. Montaigne, who … essay, addressed this issue head on in “To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die.” It is perhaps his best-known essay, a kind of summation of his philosophy, and considered his most stoic. There are three main themes: first, do not forget that we all die, including you; second, there’s no reason to be afraid or to worry; third, be ready when the time comes, as it inevitably will. Keeping death in mind, he argues, diminishes the shock when it happens to others and alleviates the suffering by putting things in perspective. Acceptance and understanding should, in turn, help us remember that death is a part of the natural order, and that it happens only once, after which there is nothing to worry about simply because there is nothing after the end of it all. These all help us to be prepared and to appreciate the present even more, releasing us from the enslavement of fear and anxiety. Carpe diem!
The essay contains numerous quotes in Latin from the ancients that reinforce his ideas. These are followed by an English translation and citation of the source in the original.


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Philosophy

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMP3 Audiobook Classics
Release dateOct 23, 2020
ISBN9781662149757

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CHAPTER XIX——THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPY IS TO LEARN TO DIE Cicero says—[Tusc., i. 31.]—“that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.” The reason of which is, because study and contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a resemblance of death; or, else, because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear to die. And to say the truth, either our reason mocks us, or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment only, nor to endeavour anything but, in sum, to make us live well, and, as the Holy Scripture says, at our ease. All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, though we make use of divers means to attain it: they would, other- wise, be rejected at the first motion; for who would give ear to him that should propose affliction and misery for his end? The controversies and disputes of the philosophical sects upon this point are merely verbal: “Transcurramus solertissimas nugas” [“Let us skip over those subtle trifles.”—Seneca, Ep., 117.] 

—there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent with so sacred a profession; but what- soever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it. Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure. It amuses me to rattle in ears this word, which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever. This pleasure, for being more gay, more sinewy, more robust and more manly, is only the more seriously voluptuous, and we ought give it the name of pleasure, as that which is more favourable, gentle, and natural, and not that from which we have denominated it. The other and meaner pleasure, if it could deserve this fair name, it ought to be by way of competition, and not of privilege. I find it less exempt from traverses and inconveniences than virtue itself; and, besides that the enjoyment is more momentary, fluid, and frail, it has its watchings, fasts, and labours, its sweat and its blood; and, moreover, has particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding passions, and so dull a satiety attending it, as equal it to the severest penance. And we mistake if we think that these incommodities serve it for a spur and a seasoning to its sweetness (as in nature one contrary is quickened by another), or say, when we come to virtue, that like consequences and difficulties overwhelm and render it aus- tere and inaccessible; whereas, much more aptly than in voluptuousness, they ennoble, sharpen, and heighten the perfect and divine pleasure they procure us. He renders himself unworthy of it who will counterpoise its cost with its fruit, and neither understands the blessing nor how to use it. Those who preach to us that the quest of it is craggy, difficult, and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to tell us that it is always unpleasing? For what human means will ever attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever possessing it. But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures we know, the very pursuit is pleasant. The attempt ever relishes of the quality of the thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of, and consubstantial with, the effect. The felicity and beatitude that glitters in Virtue, shines throughout all her appurtenances and avenues, even to the first entry and utmost limits. Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. Which is the reason why all the rules centre and concur in this one article. And although they all in like manner, with common accord, teach us also to despise pain, poverty, and the other accidents to which human life is subject, it is not, nevertheless, with the same solicitude, as well by reason these accidents are not of so great necessity, the greater part of mankind passing over their whole lives without ever knowing what poverty is, and some without sorrow or sickness, as Xenophilus the musician, who lived a hundred and six years in a perfect and continual health; as also because, at the worst, death can, whenever we please, cut short and put an end to all other inconveniences. But as to death, it is inevitable:— “Omnes eodem cogimur; omnium Versatur urna serius ocius Sors exitura, et nos in aeternum Exilium impositura cymbae.”


[“We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is to come out of the urn. All must to eternal exile sail away.” —Hor., Od., ii. 3, 25.] and, consequently, if it frights us, ‘tis a perpetual torment, for which there is no sort of consolation. There is no way by which it may not reach us. We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as in a suspected coun- try: “Quae, quasi saxum Tantalo, semper impendet.” [“Ever, like Tantalus stone, hangs over us.” —Cicero, De Finib., i. 18.] Our courts of justice often send back condemned criminals to be executed upon the place where the crime was committed; but, carry them to fine houses by the way, prepare for them the best entertainment you can— “Non Siculae dapes Dulcem elaborabunt saporem: Non avium cyatheaceae cantus Somnum reducent.” [“Sicilian dainties will not tickle their palates, nor the melody of birds and harps bring back sleep.”—Hor., Od., iii. 1, 18.] Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey being continually before their eyes, would not alter and deprave their palate from tasting these regalios? “Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura.” [“He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by thinking of the blow to come.”—Claudianus, in Ruf., ii. 137.] The end of our race is death; ‘tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to ad- vance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail: “Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,” [“Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards”—Lucretius, iv. 474] ‘tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it. The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, “Such a one has lived,” or “Such a one has ceased to live” —[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c. 22:]—for, provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. And from them it is that we have borrowed our expression, “The late Monsieur such and such a one.”—[“feu Monsieur un tel.”] Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our money. I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the year the 1st of January,—[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles IX. in 1563. Previously the year commenced at Easter, so that the 1st January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]—and it is now but just fifteen days since I was complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou


art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. It is full both of reason and piety, too, to take example by the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended His life at three-and-thirty years. The greatest man, that was no more than a man, Alexander, died also at the same age. How many several ways has death to surprise us? “Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis Cautum est in horas.” [“Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that may at any hour befal him.”—Hor. O. ii. 13, 13.] To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke of Brittany,—[Jean II. died 1305.]— should be pressed to death in a crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into Lyons?—[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Bertrand le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]—Hast thou not seen one of our kings—[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10, 1559]—killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by jostle of a hog?—[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]—AEschylus, threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tor- toise falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air. Another was choked with a grape-stone;—[Val. Max., ix. 12, ext. 2.]—an emperor killed with the scratch of a comb in combing his head. AEmilius Lepidus with a stumble at his own threshold,—[Pliny, Nat. Hist., vii. 33.]— and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the coun- cil-cham-ber. And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. The poor judge Bebius gave adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired. Whilst Caius Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who had already given sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, which, as it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it, nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow. These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes, how is it possible a man should disengage himself from the thought of death, or avoid fancying that it has us every moment by the throat? What matter is it, you will say, which way it comes to pass, provided a man does not terrify himself with the expec- tation? For my part, I am of this mind, and if a man could by any means avoid it, though by creeping under a calf’s skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift; all I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease, and the recreations that will most contribute to it, I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will: “Praetulerim . . . delirus inersque videri, Dum mea delectent mala me, vel denique fallant, Quam sapere, et ringi.” [“I had rather seem mad and a sluggard, so that my defects are agreeable to myself, or that I am not painfully conscious of them, than be wise, and chaptious.”—Hor., Ep., ii. 2, 126.] But ‘tis folly to think of doing anything that way. They go, they come, they gallop and dance, and not a word of death. All this is very fine; but withal, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their children, or friends, surprising them at unawares and unprepared, then, what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair! Did you ever see anything so subdued, so changed, and so confounded? A man must, therefore, make more early provision for it; and this brutish negligence, could it possibly lodge in the brain of any man of sense (which I think utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise too dear. Were it an enemy that could be avoided, I


would then advise to borrow arms even of cowardice itself; but seeing it is not, and that it will catch you as well flying and playing the poltroon, as standing to’t like an honest man:— “Nempe et fugacem persequitur virum, Nec parcit imbellis juventae Poplitibus timidoque tergo.” [“He pursues the flying poltroon, nor spares the hamstrings of the unwarlike youth who turns his back”—Hor., Ep., iii. 2, 14.] And seeing that no temper of arms is of proof to secure us:— “Ille licet ferro cautus, se condat et aere, Mors tamen inclusum protrahet inde caput” [“Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull his head out of his armour.”—Propertious iii. 18] —let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the fall- ing of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, “Well, and what if it had been death itself?” and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests:


“Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.” [“Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be the more welcome.”—Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.] Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premed- itation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who right- ly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and con- straint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, “Let him make that request to himself.”—[ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40.] In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to pur- pose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually enter- tained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age: “Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret.” [“When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.” —Catullus, lxviii.] In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me possessed with some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a few days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same-destiny was attending me. “Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit.” [“Presently the present will have gone, never to be recalled.” Lucretius, iii. 928.] Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other. It is impossible but we must feel a sting in such imaginations as these, at first; but with often turning and returning them in one’s mind, they, at last, be- come so familiar as to be no trouble at all: otherwise, I, for my part, should be in a perpetual fright and frenzy; for never man was so distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration. Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness contract my hopes. Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day. Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end; and if we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our heads, besides the accident that immediately threatens us, we shall find that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle at home, are the one as near it as the other. “Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior.” [“No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than another of to-morrow.”—Seneca, Ep., 91.] For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear too short, were it but an hour’s business I had to do. A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a league’s distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there, because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long be- fore. We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:—


“Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo Multa?” [“Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?” —Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.] for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition. One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son, as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best: “‘Miser, O miser,’ aiunt, ‘omnia ademit Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.’” [“‘Wretch that I am,’ they cry, ‘one fatal day has deprived me of all joys of life.’”—Lucretius, iii. 911.] And the builder, “Manuet,” says he, “opera interrupta, minaeque Murorum ingentes.” [“The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls unmade.”—AEneid, iv. 88.] A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action: “Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.” [“When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.” —Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.] I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being fin- ished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings: “Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum jam desiderium rerum super insidet una.” [“They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess things.”—Lucretius, iii. 913.] We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours. To this purpose it was that men first ap- pointed the places of sepulture adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to accus- tom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end, that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies should put us in mind of our frail condition: “Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis.” [“It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with


the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and covering the tables with blood.”—Silius Italicus, xi. 51.] And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company with a great image of death, by one that cried out to them, “Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead”; so it is my custom to have death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth. Neither is there anything of which I am so in- quisitive, and delight to inform myself, as the manner of men’s deaths, their words, looks, and bearing; nor any places in history I am so intent upon; and it is manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a particular fancy for that subject. If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. Di- carchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for another and less profitable end. Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagi- nation, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without dis- turbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other. And, as I have experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheer- fulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death the same. Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily decay. What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better days? “Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.” [“Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!”—-Maximian, vel Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.] Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask him leave that he might kill himself, tak- ing notice of his withered body and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, “Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet alive.”—[Seneca, Ep., 77.]—Should a man fall into this condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an insensible pace, step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than the final dissolution of a lan- guishing body, than the death of old age; forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is troublesome and painful. The body, bent and bowed, has less force to support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is, that we are to raise her up firm and erect against the power of this adversary. For, as it is impossible she should ever be at rest, whilst she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may boast (which is a thing as it were surpassing human condition) that it is impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance, should inhabit or have any place in her: “Non vulnus instants Tyranni Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae, Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus.” [“Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul,


nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves.” —Hor., Od., iii. 3, 3.] She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of necessity, shame, poverty, and all the other injuries of fortune. Let us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains: “In manicis et Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo. Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet. Opinor, Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est.” [“I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a savage keeper.—A god will when I ask Him, set me free. This god I think is death. Death is the term of all things.” —Hor., Ep., i. 16, 76.] Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt of death. Not only the argument of reason invites us to it—for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? —but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable? To him that told Socrates, “The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to death”; “And nature them,” said he.—[Socrates was not con- demned to death by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]— What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched? Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more. Aristotle tells us that there are certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning, die in their youth, and those that die at five in the evening, in their decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe? The most and the least, of ours, in comparison with eter- nity, or yet with the duration of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less ridicu- lous.—[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.] But nature compels us to it. “Go out of this world,” says she, “as you entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of the life of the world. “Inter se mortales mutua vivunt ................................ Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt.” [“Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the next comer.—” Lucretius, ii. 75, 78.] “Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things? ‘Tis the condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave: “Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit.” [“The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.” —Seneca, Her. Fur., 3 Chor. 874.]


“Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.” [“As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.” —Manilius, Ast., iv. 16.] “All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied. “Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?” [“Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast? “Lucretius, iii. 951.] “If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you desire longer to keep it? “‘Cur amplius addere quaeris, Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?’ [“Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and be again tormented?”—Lucretius, iii. 914.] “Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity: “‘Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes Aspicient.’ [“Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.” —Manilius, i. 529.] “And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the viril- ity, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will al- ways be the same thing: “‘Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.’ [“We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.” —Lucretius, iii. 1093.] “‘Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.’ [“The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.” —Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.] “I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations: “‘Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.’ [“I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: ‘tis the same thing over and over again.”—Lucretius iii. 957] “Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much fear, as if you had died at nurse: “‘Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,


Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.’ [“Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will remain eternal.”—Lucretius, iii. 1103] “And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason to be displeased. “‘In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te, Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum, Stansque jacentem.’ [“Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to lament you dead, standing on your grave.”—Idem., ibid., 898.] “Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about: “‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit. .................................................. “‘Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.’ “Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing. “‘Multo . . . mortem minus ad nos esse putandium, Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.’ “Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the world; nor does it any more concern you. “‘Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas Temporis aeterni fuerit.’ [“Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.” —Lucretius iii. 985] Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It de- pends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self- same way? “‘Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.’ [“All things, then, life over, must follow thee.” —Lucretius, iii. 981.] “Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you die: “‘Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est, Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.’ [“No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of death and funerals.”—Lucretius, v. 579.] “To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must, therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why dost thou complain of me and of destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee to govern us, or for us to govern thee? Though, perad- venture, thy age may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much a man as a giant; nei- ther men nor their lives are measured by the ell. Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with


the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain. It was I that taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ‘Why then he did not die?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it is indifferent.’—[Diogenes Laertius, i. 35.]—Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contrib- utes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.” These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches. I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others, should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor; and so ‘tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

CHAPTER XIX——THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPY IS TO LEARN TO DIE

Cicero says—[Tusc., i. 31.]—that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die. The reason of which is, because study and contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a resemblance of death; or, else, because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear to die. And to say the truth, either our reason mocks us, or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment only, nor to endeavour anything but, in sum, to make us live well, and, as the Holy Scripture says, at our ease. All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, though we make use of divers means to attain it: they would, otherwise, be rejected at the first motion; for who would give ear to him that should propose affliction and misery for his end? The controversies and disputes of the philosophical sects upon this point are merely verbal:

Transcurramus solertissimas nugas

[Let us skip over those subtle trifles.—Seneca, Ep., 117.]

—there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent with so sacred a profession; but whatsoever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it.

Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure. It amuses me to rattle in ears this word, which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever. This pleasure, for being more gay, more sinewy, more robust and more manly, is only the more seriously voluptuous, and we ought give it the name of pleasure, as that which is more favourable, gentle, and natural, and not that from which we have denominated it. The other and meaner pleasure, if it could deserve this fair name, it ought to be by way of competition, and not of privilege. I find it less exempt from traverses and inconveniences than virtue itself; and, besides that the enjoyment is more momentary, fluid, and frail, it has its watchings, fasts, and labours, its sweat and its blood; and, moreover, has particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding passions, and so dull a satiety attending it, as equal it to the severest penance. And we mistake if we think that these incommodities serve it for a spur and a seasoning to its sweetness (as in nature one contrary is quickened by another), or say, when we come to virtue, that like consequences and difficulties overwhelm and render it austere and inaccessible; whereas, much more aptly than in voluptuousness, they ennoble, sharpen, and heighten the perfect and divine pleasure they procure us. He renders himself unworthy of it who will counterpoise its cost with its fruit, and neither understands the blessing nor how to use it. Those who preach to us that the quest of it is craggy, difficult, and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to tell us that it is always unpleasing? For what human means will ever attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever possessing it. But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures we know, the very pursuit is pleasant. The attempt ever relishes of the quality of the thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of, and consubstantial with, the effect. The felicity and beatitude that glitters in Virtue, shines throughout all her appurtenances and avenues, even to the first entry and utmost limits.

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. Which is the reason why all the rules centre and concur in this one article. And although they all in like manner, with common accord, teach us also to despise pain, poverty, and the other accidents to which human life is subject, it is not, nevertheless, with the same solicitude, as well by reason these accidents are not of so great necessity, the greater part of mankind passing over their whole lives without ever knowing what poverty is, and some without sorrow or sickness, as Xenophilus the musician, who lived a hundred and six years in a perfect and continual health; as also because, at the worst, death can, whenever we please, cut short and put an end to all other inconveniences. But as to death, it is inevitable:—

"Omnes eodem cogimur; omnium

Versatur urna serius ocius

Sors exitura, et nos in aeternum

Exilium impositura cymbae."

["We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is

to come out of the urn. All must to eternal exile sail away."

—Hor., Od., ii. 3, 25.]

and, consequently, if it frights us, ‘tis a perpetual torment, for which there is no sort of consolation. There is no way by which it may not reach us. We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as in a suspected country:

Quae, quasi saxum Tantalo, semper impendet.

[Ever, like Tantalus stone, hangs over us.

—Cicero, De Finib., i. 18.]

Our courts of justice often send back condemned criminals to be executed upon the place where the crime was committed; but, carry them to fine houses by the way, prepare for them the best entertainment you can—

"Non Siculae dapes

Dulcem elaborabunt saporem:

Non avium cyatheaceae cantus

Somnum reducent."

["Sicilian dainties will not tickle their palates, nor the melody of

birds and harps bring back sleep."—Hor., Od., iii. 1, 18.]

Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey being continually before their eyes, would not alter and deprave their palate from tasting these regalios?

"Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum

Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura."

["He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring

his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by

thinking of the blow to come."—Claudianus, in Ruf., ii. 137.]

The end of our race is death; ‘tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail:

Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,

[Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards—Lucretius, iv. 474]

‘tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it.

The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, Such a one has lived, or Such a one has ceased to live —[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c. 22:]—for, provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. And from them it is that we have borrowed our expression, The late Monsieur such and such a one.—[feu Monsieur un tel.] Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our money. I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the year the 1st of January,—[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles IX. in 1563. Previously the year commenced at Easter, so that the 1st January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]—and it is now but just fifteen days since I was complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou

art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. It is full both of reason and piety, too, to take example by the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended His life at three-and-thirty years. The greatest man, that was no more than a man, Alexander, died also at the same age. How many several ways has death to surprise us?

"Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis

Cautum est in horas."

["Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that

may at any hour befal him."—Hor. O. ii. 13, 13.]

To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke of Brittany,—[Jean II. died 1305.]—should be pressed to death in a crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into Lyons?—[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Bertrand le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]—Hast thou not seen one of our kings—[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10, 1559]—killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by jostle of a hog?—[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]—AEschylus, threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air. Another was choked with a grape-stone;—[Val. Max., ix. 12, ext. 2.]—an emperor killed with the scratch of a comb in combing his head. AEmilius Lepidus with a stumble at his own threshold,—[Pliny, Nat. Hist., vii. 33.]— and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the council-chamber. And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. The poor judge Bebius gave adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired. Whilst Caius Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who had already given sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, which, as it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it, nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow.

These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes, how is it possible a man should disengage himself from the thought of death, or avoid fancying that it has us every moment by the throat? What matter is it, you will say, which way it comes to pass, provided a man does not terrify himself with the expectation? For my part, I am of this mind, and if a man could by any means avoid it, though by creeping under a calf’s skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift; all I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease, and the recreations that will most contribute to it, I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will:

"Praetulerim . . . delirus inersque videri,

Dum mea delectent mala me, vel denique fallant,

Quam sapere, et ringi."

["I had rather seem mad and a sluggard, so that my defects are

agreeable to myself, or that I am not painfully conscious of them,

than be wise, and chaptious."—Hor., Ep., ii. 2, 126.]

But ‘tis folly to think of doing anything that way. They go, they come, they gallop and dance, and not a word of death. All this is very fine; but withal, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their children, or friends, surprising them at unawares and unprepared, then, what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair! Did you ever see anything so subdued, so changed, and so confounded? A man must, therefore, make more early provision for it; and this brutish negligence, could it possibly lodge in the brain of any man of sense (which I think utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise too dear. Were it an enemy that could be avoided, I

would then advise to borrow arms even of cowardice itself; but seeing it is not, and that it will catch you as well flying and playing the poltroon, as standing to’t like an honest man:—

"Nempe et fugacem persequitur virum,

Nec parcit imbellis juventae

Poplitibus timidoque tergo."

["He pursues the flying poltroon, nor spares the hamstrings of the

unwarlike youth who turns his back"—Hor., Ep., iii. 2, 14.]

And seeing that no temper of arms is of proof to secure us:—

"Ille licet ferro cautus, se condat et aere,

Mors tamen inclusum protrahet inde caput"

["Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull

his head out of his armour."—Propertious iii. 18]

—let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, Well, and what if it had been death itself? and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests:

"Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum

Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora."

["Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected,

will be the more welcome."—Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.]

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, Let him make that request to himself.—[ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40.]

In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age:

Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret.

[When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.

—Catullus, lxviii.]

In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me possessed with some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a few days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same-destiny was attending me.

Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit.

[Presently the present will have gone, never to be recalled.

Lucretius, iii. 928.]

Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other. It is impossible but we must feel a sting in such imaginations as these, at first; but with often turning and returning them in one’s mind, they, at last, become so familiar as to be no trouble at all: otherwise, I, for my part, should be in a perpetual fright and frenzy; for never man was so distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration. Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness contract my hopes. Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day. Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end; and if we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our heads, besides the accident that immediately threatens us, we shall find that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle at home, are the one as near it as the other.

Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior.

["No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than

another of to-morrow."—Seneca, Ep., 91.]

For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear too short, were it but an hour’s business I had to do.

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a league’s distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there, because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:—

"Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo

Multa?"

[Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?

—Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition. One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son, as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best:

"‘Miser, O miser,’ aiunt, ‘omnia ademit

Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.’"

["‘Wretch that I am,’ they cry, ‘one fatal day has deprived me of

all joys of life.’"—Lucretius, iii. 911.]

And the builder,

Manuet, says he, "opera interrupta, minaeque

Murorum ingentes."

["The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls

unmade."—AEneid, iv. 88.]

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action:

Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.

[When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.

—Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.]

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:

"Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum

jam desiderium rerum super insidet una."

["They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess

things."—Lucretius, iii. 913.]

We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours. To this purpose it was that men first appointed the places of sepulture adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to accustom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end, that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies should put us in mind of our frail condition:

"Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede

Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira

Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum

Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis."

["It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and

to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with

the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and

covering the tables with blood."—Silius Italicus, xi. 51.]

And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company with a great image of death, by one that cried out to them, Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead; so it is my custom to have death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth. Neither is there anything of which I am so inquisitive, and delight to inform myself, as the manner of men’s deaths, their words, looks, and bearing; nor any places in history I am so intent upon; and it is manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a particular fancy for that subject. If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for another and less profitable end.

Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other. And, as I have experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death the same.

Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily decay. What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better days?

Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.

[Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!—-Maximian, vel

Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.]

Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet alive.—[Seneca, Ep., 77.]—Should a man fall into this condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an insensible pace, step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than the final dissolution of a languishing body, than the death of old age; forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is troublesome and painful. The body, bent and bowed, has less force to support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is, that we are to raise her up firm and erect against the power of this adversary. For, as it is impossible she should ever be at rest, whilst she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may boast (which is a thing as it were surpassing human condition) that it is impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance, should inhabit or have any place in her:

"Non vulnus instants Tyranni

Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster

Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,

Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus."

["Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul,

nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the

strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves."

—Hor., Od., iii. 3, 3.]

She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of necessity, shame, poverty, and all the other injuries of fortune. Let us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains:

"In manicis et

Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo.

Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet. Opinor,

Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est."

["I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a

savage keeper.—A god will when I ask Him, set me free.

This god I think is death. Death is the term of all things."

—Hor., Ep., i. 16, 76.]

Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt of death. Not only the argument of reason invites us to it—for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? —but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable? To him that told Socrates, The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to death; And nature them, said he.—[Socrates was not condemned to death by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]— What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched? Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more. Aristotle tells us that there are certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning, die in their youth, and those that die at five in the evening, in their decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe? The most and the least, of ours, in comparison with eternity, or yet with the duration of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less ridiculous.—[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.]

But nature compels us to it. Go out of this world, says she, "as you entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of the life of the world.

"Inter se mortales mutua vivunt

................................

Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt."

["Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners

in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the

next comer.—" Lucretius, ii. 75, 78.]

"Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things? ‘Tis the condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave:

Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit.

[The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.

—Seneca, Her. Fur., 3 Chor. 874.]

Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.

[As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.

—Manilius, Ast., iv. 16.]

"All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?

["Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?

"Lucretius, iii. 951.]

"If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you desire longer to keep it?

"‘Cur amplius addere quaeris,

Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?’

["Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and

be again tormented?"—Lucretius, iii. 914.]

"Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity:

"‘Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes

Aspicient.’

[Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.

—Manilius, i. 529.]

"And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same thing:

"‘Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.’

[We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.

—Lucretius, iii. 1093.]

"‘Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.’

[The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.

—Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.]

"I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations:

"‘Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque

Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.’

["I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: ‘tis the same

thing over and over again."—Lucretius iii. 957]

"Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much fear, as if you had died at nurse:

"‘Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,

Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.’

["Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will

remain eternal."—Lucretius, iii. 1103]

"And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason to be displeased.

"‘In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te,

Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum,

Stansque jacentem.’

["Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to

lament you dead, standing on your grave."—Idem., ibid., 898.]

"Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about:

"‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit.

..................................................

"‘Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.’

"Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing.

"‘Multo . . . mortem minus ad nos esse putandium,

Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.’

"Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the world; nor does it any more concern you.

"‘Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas

Temporis aeterni fuerit.’

[Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.

—Lucretius iii. 985]

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

"‘Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.’

[All things, then, life over, must follow thee.

—Lucretius, iii. 981.]

"Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you die:

"‘Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est,

Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris

Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.’

["No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which

there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of

death and funerals."—Lucretius, v. 579.]

"To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must, therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why dost thou complain of me and of destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee to govern us, or for us to govern thee? Though, peradventure, thy age may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell. Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with

the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain. It was I that taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ‘Why then he did not die?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it is indifferent.’—[Diogenes Laertius, i. 35.]—Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it." These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches.

I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others, should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor; and so ‘tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.
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CHAPTER XIX——THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPY IS TO LEARN TO DIE 
 
Cicero says—[Tusc., i. 31.]—“that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.” The reason of 
which is, because study and contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it separately 
from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a resemblance of death; or, else, because all the wisdom 
and reasoning in the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear to die. And to say the 
truth, either our reason mocks us, or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment only, nor to endeavour 
anything but, in sum, to make us live well, and, as the Holy Scripture says, at our ease. All the opinions of the 
world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, though we make use of divers means to attain it: they would, other- 
wise, be rejected at the first motion; for who would give ear to him that should propose affliction and misery for 
his end? The controversies and disputes of the philosophical sects upon this point are merely verbal: 
               “Transcurramus solertissimas nugas” 
 
     [“Let us skip over those subtle trifles.”—Seneca, Ep., 117.] 
—there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent with so sacred a profession; but what- 
soever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it. 
Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure. It amuses me to 
rattle in ears this word, which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and contentment, it is 
more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever. This pleasure, for being more gay, 
more sinewy, more robust and more manly, is only the more seriously voluptuous, and we ought give it the 
name of pleasure, as that which is more favourable, gentle, and natural, and not that from which we have 
denominated it. The other and meaner pleasure, if it could deserve this fair name, it ought to be by way of 
competition, and not of privilege. I find it less exempt from traverses and inconveniences than virtue itself; and, 
besides that the enjoyment is more momentary, fluid, and frail, it has its watchings, fasts, and labours, its sweat 
and its blood; and, moreover, has particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding passions, 
and so dull a satiety attending it, as equal it to the severest penance. And we mistake if we think that these 
incommodities serve it for a spur and a seasoning to its sweetness (as in nature one contrary is quickened by 
another), or say, when we come to virtue, that like consequences and difficulties overwhelm and render it aus- 
tere and inaccessible; whereas, much more aptly than in voluptuousness, they ennoble, sharpen, and heighten 
the perfect and divine pleasure they procure us. He renders himself unworthy of it who will counterpoise its cost 
with its fruit, and neither understands the blessing nor how to use it. Those who preach to us that the quest of it 
is craggy, difficult, and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to tell us that it is always 
unpleasing? For what human means will ever attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content 
themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever possessing it. But they are deceived, seeing 
that of all the pleasures we know, the very pursuit is pleasant. The attempt ever relishes of the quality of the 
thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of, and consubstantial with, the effect. The felicity and beatitude 
that glitters in Virtue, shines throughout all her appurtenances and avenues, even to the first entry and utmost 
limits. 
Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means 
that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, 
without which all other pleasure would be extinct. Which is the reason why all the rules centre and concur in this 
one article. And although they all in like manner, with common accord, teach us also to despise pain, poverty, 
and the other accidents to which human life is subject, it is not, nevertheless, with the same solicitude, as well 
by reason these accidents are not of so great necessity, the greater part of mankind passing over their whole 
lives without ever knowing what poverty is, and some without sorrow or sickness, as Xenophilus the musician, 
who lived a hundred and six years in a perfect and continual health; as also because, at the worst, death can, 
whenever we please, cut short and put an end to all other inconveniences. But as to death, it is inevitable:— 
              “Omnes eodem cogimur; omnium 
               Versatur urna serius ocius 
               Sors exitura, et nos in aeternum 
               Exilium impositura cymbae.” 
 
     [“We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is 
     to come out of the urn.  All must to eternal exile sail away.” 
       —Hor., Od., ii.  3, 25.] 
and, consequently, if it frights us, ‘tis a perpetual torment, for which there is no sort of consolation. There is no 
way by which it may not reach us. We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as in a suspected coun- 
try: 
          “Quae, quasi saxum Tantalo, semper impendet.” 
 
          [“Ever, like Tantalus stone, hangs over us.” 
            —Cicero, De Finib., i. 18.] 
Our courts of justice often send back condemned criminals to be executed upon the place where the crime was 
committed; but, carry them to fine houses by the way, prepare for them the best entertainment you can— 
                    “Non Siculae dapes 
               Dulcem elaborabunt saporem: 
               Non avium cyatheaceae cantus 
               Somnum reducent.” 
 
     [“Sicilian dainties will not tickle their palates, nor the melody of 
     birds and harps bring back sleep.”—Hor., Od., iii. 1, 18.] 
Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey being continually before their eyes, would 
not alter and deprave their palate from tasting these regalios? 
         “Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum 
          Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura.” 
 
     [“He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring 
     his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by 
     thinking of the blow to come.”—Claudianus, in Ruf., ii.  137.] 
The end of our race is death; ‘tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to ad- 
vance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity 
can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail: 
          “Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,” 
 
     [“Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards”—Lucretius, iv. 474] 
‘tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many 
cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, 
not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon 
and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is 
to do it. 
The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, 
found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, 
“Such a one has lived,” or “Such a one has ceased to live” —[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c. 22:]—for, provided 
there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. And from them 
it is that we have borrowed our expression, “The late Monsieur such and such a one.”—[“feu Monsieur un tel.”] 
Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our money. I was born betwixt eleven and twelve 
o’clock in the forenoon the last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the year the 1st of 
January,—[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles IX. in 1563. Previously the year commenced at Easter, so 
that the 1st January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]—and it is now but just fifteen days since I was 
complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a 
man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; 
no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and 
decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou 
art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects 
and experience. According to the common course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary 
favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how 
many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled 
their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before 
than after five-and-thirty years of age. It is full both of reason and piety, too, to take example by the humanity of 
Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended His life at three-and-thirty years. The greatest man, that was no more than 
a man, Alexander, died also at the same age. How many several ways has death to surprise us? 
              “Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis 
               Cautum est in horas.” 
 
     [“Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that 
     may at any hour befal him.”—Hor. O. ii.  13, 13.] 
To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke of Brittany,—[Jean II. died 1305.]— 
should be pressed to death in a crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into 
Lyons?—[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary neighbour, perhaps because he was the 
Archbishop of Bordeaux. Bertrand le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]—Hast thou not seen 
one of our kings—[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10, 1559]—killed at a tilting, and did not one of his 
ancestors die by jostle of a hog?—[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]—AEschylus, threatened with the fall of a 
house, was to much purpose circumspect to avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tor- 
toise falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air. Another was choked with a grape-stone;—[Val. Max., ix. 12, ext. 
2.]—an emperor killed with the scratch of a comb in combing his head. AEmilius Lepidus with a stumble at his 
own threshold,—[Pliny, Nat. Hist., vii. 33.]— and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the coun- 
cil-cham-ber. And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the 
watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a 
Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. The poor judge Bebius gave adjournment in a case for eight days; 
but he himself, meanwhile, was condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired. Whilst Caius Julius, the 
physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own 
blood, a brother of mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who had already given 
sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, 
which, as it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it, nor so much as sat down to 
repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow. 
These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes, how is it possible a man should 
disengage himself from the thought of death, or avoid fancying that it has us every moment by the throat? What 
matter is it, you will say, which way it comes to pass, provided a man does not terrify himself with the expec- 
tation? For my part, I am of this mind, and if a man could by any means avoid it, though by creeping under a 
calf’s skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift; all I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease, and the 
recreations that will most contribute to it, I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will: 
              “Praetulerim .  .  .  delirus inersque videri, 
               Dum mea delectent mala me, vel denique fallant, 
               Quam sapere, et ringi.” 
 
     [“I had rather seem mad and a sluggard, so that my defects are 
     agreeable to myself, or that I am not painfully conscious of them, 
     than be wise, and chaptious.”—Hor., Ep., ii. 2, 126.] 
But ‘tis folly to think of doing anything that way. They go, they come, they gallop and dance, and not a word of 
death. All this is very fine; but withal, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their children, or friends, 
surprising them at unawares and unprepared, then, what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair! 
Did you ever see anything so subdued, so changed, and so confounded? A man must, therefore, make more 
early provision for it; and this brutish negligence, could it possibly lodge in the brain of any man of sense 
(which I think utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise too dear. Were it an enemy that could be avoided, I 
would then advise to borrow arms even of cowardice itself; but seeing it is not, and that it will catch you as well 
flying and playing the poltroon, as standing to’t like an honest man:— 
                   “Nempe et fugacem persequitur virum, 
                    Nec parcit imbellis juventae 
                    Poplitibus timidoque tergo.” 
 
     [“He pursues the flying poltroon, nor spares the hamstrings of the 
     unwarlike youth who turns his back”—Hor., Ep., iii. 2, 14.] 
And seeing that no temper of arms is of proof to secure us:— 
              “Ille licet ferro cautus, se condat et aere, 
               Mors tamen inclusum protrahet inde caput” 
 
     [“Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull 
     his head out of his armour.”—Propertious iii. 18] 
—let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage 
he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and 
strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. 
Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the fall- 
ing of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, “Well, and what if it had 
been death itself?” and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity 
and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far 
transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many 
several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were 
wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to 
be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests:  
 
            “Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum 
               Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.” 
 
     [“Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, 
     will be the more welcome.”—Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.] 
Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premed- 
itation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who right- 
ly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and con- 
straint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him 
that he would not lead him in his triumph, “Let him make that request to himself.”—[ Plutarch, Life of Paulus 
Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40.] 
In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to pur- 
pose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually enter- 
tained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age: 
               “Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret.” 
 
          [“When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.” 
            —Catullus, lxviii.] 
In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me possessed with some jealousy, or the 
uncertainty of some hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a few 
days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full 
of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same-destiny was attending 
me. 
          “Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit.” 
 
     [“Presently the present will have gone, never to be recalled.” 
      Lucretius, iii.  928.] 
Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other. It is impossible but we must feel a sting 
in such imaginations as these, at first; but with often turning and returning them in one’s mind, they, at last, be- 
come so familiar as to be no trouble at all: otherwise, I, for my part, should be in a perpetual fright and frenzy; 
for never man was so distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration. Neither health, which I 
have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness 
contract my hopes. Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it eternally runs in my mind, that what may be 
done to-morrow, may be done to-day. Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end; and if 
we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our heads, besides the accident that immediately 
threatens us, we shall find that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that sit by the fire, 
those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle at home, are the one as near it as the other. 
     “Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior.” 
 
     [“No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than 
     another of to-morrow.”—Seneca, Ep., 91.] 
For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear too short, were it but an hour’s business 
I had to do. 
A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a memorandum of something I would have 
done after my decease, whereupon I told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a league’s 
distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when that thing came into my head, I made haste to 
write it down there, because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am eternally brooding over 
my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am 
ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long be- 
fore. We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take 
care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:— 
                   “Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo 
                    Multa?” 
 
     [“Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?” 
       —Hor., Od., ii.  16, 17.] 
for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition. One man complains, more than of 
death, that he is thereby prevented of a glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his 
daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he must lose the society of his wife; a 
fourth, the conversation of his son, as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am, thanks 
be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without 
regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken 
of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to 
shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best: 
                    “‘Miser, O miser,’ aiunt, ‘omnia ademit 
               Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.’” 
 
     [“‘Wretch that I am,’ they cry, ‘one fatal day has deprived me of 
     all joys of life.’”—Lucretius, iii. 911.] 
And the builder, 
              “Manuet,” says he, “opera interrupta, minaeque 
               Murorum ingentes.” 
 
     [“The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls 
     unmade.”—AEneid, iv.  88.] 
A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate 
desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action: 
               “Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.” 
 
     [“When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.” 
       —Ovid, Amor., ii.  10, 36.] 
I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; 
and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being fin- 
ished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the 
thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our 
kings: 
         “Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum 
          jam desiderium rerum super insidet una.” 
 
     [“They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess 
     things.”—Lucretius, iii.  913.] 
We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours. To this purpose it was that men first ap- 
pointed the places of sepulture adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to accus- 
tom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that they should not be startled at the sight of a 
corpse, and to the end, that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies should put us in 
mind of our frail condition: 
              “Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede 
               Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira 
               Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum 
               Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis.” 
 
     [“It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and 
     to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with 
     the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and 
     covering the tables with blood.”—Silius Italicus, xi. 51.] 
And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company with a great image of death, by one that 
cried out to them, “Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead”; so it is my custom to have 
death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth. Neither is there anything of which I am so in- 
quisitive, and delight to inform myself, as the manner of men’s deaths, their words, looks, and bearing; nor any 
places in history I am so intent upon; and it is manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I 
have a particular fancy for that subject. If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of 
the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. Di- 
carchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for another and less profitable end. 
Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagi- 
nation, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: 
to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without dis- 
turbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, 
we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a 
certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am 
well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, 
by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. 
Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the 
more easily exchange the one for the other. And, as I have experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar 
says, things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had 
maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheer- 
fulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present 
condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much 
more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death the 
same. 
Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily suffer, how nature deprives us of the light 
and sense of our bodily decay. What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better days? 
               “Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.” 
 
     [“Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!”—-Maximian, vel 
     Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.] 
Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask him leave that he might kill himself, tak- 
ing notice of his withered body and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, “Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet 
alive.”—[Seneca, Ep., 77.]—Should a man fall into this condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable 
of enduring such a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an insensible pace, step 
by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible 
of the stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than the final dissolution of a lan- 
guishing body, than the death of old age; forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at 
all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is troublesome and painful. The body, bent and 
bowed, has less force to support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is, that we are to 
raise her up firm and erect against the power of this adversary. For, as it is impossible she should ever be at 
rest, whilst she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may boast (which is a thing as it were 
surpassing human condition) that it is impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance, 
should inhabit or have any place in her: 
              “Non vulnus instants Tyranni 
               Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster 
               Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae, 
               Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus.” 
 
     [“Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul, 
     nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the 
     strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves.” 
      —Hor., Od., iii.  3, 3.] 
She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of necessity, shame, poverty, and all the 
other injuries of fortune. Let us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true and sovereign 
liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and 
chains: 
                              “In manicis et 
               Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo. 
               Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet.  Opinor, 
               Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est.” 
 
          [“I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a 
          savage keeper.—A god will when I ask Him, set me free. 
          This god I think is death.  Death is the term of all things.” 
           —Hor., Ep., i.  16, 76.] 
Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt of death. Not only the argument of 
reason invites us to it—for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? —but, 
also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than 
once to undergo one of them? And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable? To him that told 
Socrates, “The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to death”; “And nature them,” said he.—[Socrates was not con- 
demned to death by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]— What a ridiculous thing 
it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us 
the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall 
not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death 
is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off 
our former veil in entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it reasonable so long to fear a 
thing that will so soon be despatched? Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor 
short, to things that are no more. Aristotle tells us that there are certain little beasts upon the banks of the river 
Hypanis, that never live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning, die in their youth, and 
those that die at five in the evening, in their decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of 
continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe? The most and the least, of ours, in comparison with eter- 
nity, or yet with the duration of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less ridicu- 
lous.—[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.] 
But nature compels us to it. “Go out of this world,” says she, “as you entered into it; the same pass you made 
from death to life, without passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to death. Your 
death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of the life of the world. 
                    “Inter se mortales mutua vivunt 
                    ................................ 
                    Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt.” 
 
     [“Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners 
     in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the 
     next comer.—” Lucretius, ii.  75, 78.] 
“Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things? ‘Tis the condition of your creation; death is a part 
of you, and whilst you endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours that you now enjoy 
is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave: 
          “Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit.” 
 
     [“The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.” 
      —Seneca, Her.  Fur., 3 Chor.  874.] 
 
          “Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.” 
 
     [“As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.” 
       —Manilius, Ast., iv.  16.] 
“All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your 
life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, 
when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you 
live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you 
have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied. 
               “Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?” 
 
     [“Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast? 
     “Lucretius, iii.  951.] 
“If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose 
it, to what end would you desire longer to keep it? 
               “‘Cur amplius addere quaeris, 
          Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?’ 
 
     [“Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and 
     be again tormented?”—Lucretius, iii. 914.] 
“Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, 
you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very 
sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, 
and that shall also entertain your posterity: 
               “‘Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes 
               Aspicient.’ 
 
     [“Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.” 
      —Manilius, i. 529.] 
“And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a 
year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the viril- 
ity, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will al- 
ways be the same thing: 
               “‘Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.’ 
 
     [“We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.” 
      —Lucretius, iii. 1093.] 
 
               “‘Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.’ 
 
     [“The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.” 
      —Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.] 
“I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations: 
             “‘Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque 
               Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.’ 
 
     [“I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: ‘tis the same 
     thing over and over again.”—Lucretius iii. 957] 
“Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of 
being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you shall by 
that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the 
condition you so much fear, as if you had died at nurse: 
               “‘Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla, 
          Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.’ 
 
     [“Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will 
     remain eternal.”—Lucretius, iii. 1103] 
“And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason to be displeased. 
          “‘In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te, 
          Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum, 
          Stansque jacentem.’ 
 
     [“Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to 
     lament you dead, standing on your grave.”—Idem., ibid., 898.] 
“Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about: 
          “‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit. 
          .................................................. 
          “‘Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.’ 
“Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing. 
        “‘Multo .  .  .  mortem minus ad nos esse putandium, 
          Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.’ 
“Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; 
dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more 
yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the world; nor does it any more concern you. 
         “‘Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas 
          Temporis aeterni fuerit.’ 
 
     [“Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.” 
      —Lucretius iii. 985] 
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of 
time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It de- 
pends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can 
imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but 
hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self- 
same way? 
          “‘Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.’ 
 
          [“All things, then, life over, must follow thee.” 
           —Lucretius, iii.  981.] 
“Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there anything that does not grow old, as well as 
you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you die: 
        “‘Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est, 
          Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris 
          Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.’ 
 
     [“No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which 
     there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of 
     death and funerals.”—Lucretius, v.  579.] 
“To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no possibility to evade it? you have seen examples 
enough of those who have been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but have you ever 
found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must, therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing 
you have neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why dost thou complain of me and 
of destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee to govern us, or for us to govern thee? Though, perad- 
venture, thy age may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much a man as a giant; nei- 
ther men nor their lives are measured by the ell. Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with 
the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its duration, his father Saturn. Do 
but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I 
have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it; I have 
mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and 
indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate 
life, nor have any antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have tempered the one and the 
other betwixt pleasure and pain. It was I that taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to 
die were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ‘Why then he did not die?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it 
is indifferent.’—[Diogenes Laertius, i. 35.]—Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of 
mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contrib- 
utes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not 
confess it. Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.” These are the good lessons our mother 
Nature teaches. 
I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look 
upon it in ourselves or in others, should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own 
houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining milksops), and that being still in all 
places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of 
people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations 
wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of 
mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering 
servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, 
nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid even 
of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor; and so ‘tis with us; the visor must be removed 
as well from things as from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same 
death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. 
Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials. 
CHAPTER XIX——THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPY IS TO LEARN TO DIE
Cicero says—[Tusc., i. 31.]—that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die. The reason of which is, because study and contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a resemblance of death; or, else, because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear to die. And to say the truth, either our reason mocks us, or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment only, nor to endeavour anything but, in sum, to make us live well, and, as the Holy Scripture says, at our ease. All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, though we make use of divers means to attain it: they would, otherwise, be rejected at the first motion; for who would give ear to him that should propose affliction and misery for his end? The controversies and disputes of the philosophical sects upon this point are merely verbal:

               Transcurramus solertissimas nugas

     [Let us skip over those subtle trifles.—Seneca, Ep., 117.]

—there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent with so sacred a profession; but whatsoever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it.

Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure. It amuses me to rattle in ears this word, which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever. This pleasure, for being more gay, more sinewy, more robust and more manly, is only the more seriously voluptuous, and we ought give it the name of pleasure, as that which is more favourable, gentle, and natural, and not that from which we have denominated it. The other and meaner pleasure, if it could deserve this fair name, it ought to be by way of competition, and not of privilege. I find it less exempt from traverses and inconveniences than virtue itself; and, besides that the enjoyment is more momentary, fluid, and frail, it has its watchings, fasts, and labours, its sweat and its blood; and, moreover, has particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding passions, and so dull a satiety attending it, as equal it to the severest penance. And we mistake if we think that these incommodities serve it for a spur and a seasoning to its sweetness (as in nature one contrary is quickened by another), or say, when we come to virtue, that like consequences and difficulties overwhelm and render it austere and inaccessible; whereas, much more aptly than in voluptuousness, they ennoble, sharpen, and heighten the perfect and divine pleasure they procure us. He renders himself unworthy of it who will counterpoise its cost with its fruit, and neither understands the blessing nor how to use it. Those who preach to us that the quest of it is craggy, difficult, and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to tell us that it is always unpleasing? For what human means will ever attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever possessing it. But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures we know, the very pursuit is pleasant. The attempt ever relishes of the quality of the thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of, and consubstantial with, the effect. The felicity and beatitude that glitters in Virtue, shines throughout all her appurtenances and avenues, even to the first entry and utmost limits.

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. Which is the reason why all the rules centre and concur in this one article. And although they all in like manner, with common accord, teach us also to despise pain, poverty, and the other accidents to which human life is subject, it is not, nevertheless, with the same solicitude, as well by reason these accidents are not of so great necessity, the greater part of mankind passing over their whole lives without ever knowing what poverty is, and some without sorrow or sickness, as Xenophilus the musician, who lived a hundred and six years in a perfect and continual health; as also because, at the worst, death can, whenever we please, cut short and put an end to all other inconveniences. But as to death, it is inevitable:—

              "Omnes eodem cogimur; omnium

               Versatur urna serius ocius

               Sors exitura, et nos in aeternum

               Exilium impositura cymbae."

     ["We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is

     to come out of the urn.  All must to eternal exile sail away."

       —Hor., Od., ii.  3, 25.]

and, consequently, if it frights us, ‘tis a perpetual torment, for which there is no sort of consolation. There is no way by which it may not reach us. We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as in a suspected country:

          Quae, quasi saxum Tantalo, semper impendet.

          [Ever, like Tantalus stone, hangs over us.

            —Cicero, De Finib., i. 18.]

Our courts of justice often send back condemned criminals to be executed upon the place where the crime was committed; but, carry them to fine houses by the way, prepare for them the best entertainment you can—

                    "Non Siculae dapes

               Dulcem elaborabunt saporem:

               Non avium cyatheaceae cantus

               Somnum reducent."

     ["Sicilian dainties will not tickle their palates, nor the melody of

     birds and harps bring back sleep."—Hor., Od., iii. 1, 18.]

Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey being continually before their eyes, would not alter and deprave their palate from tasting these regalios?

         "Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum

          Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura."

     ["He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring

     his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by

     thinking of the blow to come."—Claudianus, in Ruf., ii.  137.]

The end of our race is death; ‘tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail:

          Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,

     [Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards—Lucretius, iv. 474]

‘tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it.

The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, Such a one has lived, or Such a one has ceased to live —[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c. 22:]—for, provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. And from them it is that we have borrowed our expression, The late Monsieur such and such a one.—[feu Monsieur un tel.] Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our money. I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the year the 1st of January,—[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles IX. in 1563. Previously the year commenced at Easter, so that the 1st January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]—and it is now but just fifteen days since I was complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou

art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. It is full both of reason and piety, too, to take example by the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended His life at three-and-thirty years. The greatest man, that was no more than a man, Alexander, died also at the same age. How many several ways has death to surprise us?

              "Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis

               Cautum est in horas."

     ["Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that

     may at any hour befal him."—Hor. O. ii.  13, 13.]

To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke of Brittany,—[Jean II. died 1305.]—should be pressed to death in a crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into Lyons?—[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Bertrand le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]—Hast thou not seen one of our kings—[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10, 1559]—killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by jostle of a hog?—[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]—AEschylus, threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air. Another was choked with a grape-stone;—[Val. Max., ix. 12, ext. 2.]—an emperor killed with the scratch of a comb in combing his head. AEmilius Lepidus with a stumble at his own threshold,—[Pliny, Nat. Hist., vii. 33.]— and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the council-chamber. And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. The poor judge Bebius gave adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired. Whilst Caius Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who had already given sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, which, as it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it, nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow.

These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes, how is it possible a man should disengage himself from the thought of death, or avoid fancying that it has us every moment by the throat? What matter is it, you will say, which way it comes to pass, provided a man does not terrify himself with the expectation? For my part, I am of this mind, and if a man could by any means avoid it, though by creeping under a calf’s skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift; all I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease, and the recreations that will most contribute to it, I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will:

              "Praetulerim .  .  .  delirus inersque videri,

               Dum mea delectent mala me, vel denique fallant,

               Quam sapere, et ringi."

     ["I had rather seem mad and a sluggard, so that my defects are

     agreeable to myself, or that I am not painfully conscious of them,

     than be wise, and chaptious."—Hor., Ep., ii. 2, 126.]

But ‘tis folly to think of doing anything that way. They go, they come, they gallop and dance, and not a word of death. All this is very fine; but withal, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their children, or friends, surprising them at unawares and unprepared, then, what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair! Did you ever see anything so subdued, so changed, and so confounded? A man must, therefore, make more early provision for it; and this brutish negligence, could it possibly lodge in the brain of any man of sense (which I think utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise too dear. Were it an enemy that could be avoided, I

would then advise to borrow arms even of cowardice itself; but seeing it is not, and that it will catch you as well flying and playing the poltroon, as standing to’t like an honest man:—

                   "Nempe et fugacem persequitur virum,

                    Nec parcit imbellis juventae

                    Poplitibus timidoque tergo."

     ["He pursues the flying poltroon, nor spares the hamstrings of the

     unwarlike youth who turns his back"—Hor., Ep., iii. 2, 14.]

And seeing that no temper of arms is of proof to secure us:—

              "Ille licet ferro cautus, se condat et aere,

               Mors tamen inclusum protrahet inde caput"

     ["Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull

     his head out of his armour."—Propertious iii. 18]

—let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, Well, and what if it had been death itself? and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests: 

            "Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum

               Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora."

     ["Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected,

     will be the more welcome."—Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.]

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, Let him make that request to himself.—[ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40.]

In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age:

               Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret.

          [When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.

            —Catullus, lxviii.]

In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me possessed with some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a few days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same-destiny was attending me.

          Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit.

     [Presently the present will have gone, never to be recalled.

      Lucretius, iii.  928.]

Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other. It is impossible but we must feel a sting in such imaginations as these, at first; but with often turning and returning them in one’s mind, they, at last, become so familiar as to be no trouble at all: otherwise, I, for my part, should be in a perpetual fright and frenzy; for never man was so distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration. Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness contract my hopes. Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day. Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end; and if we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our heads, besides the accident that immediately threatens us, we shall find that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle at home, are the one as near it as the other.

     Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior.

     ["No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than

     another of to-morrow."—Seneca, Ep., 91.]

For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear too short, were it but an hour’s business I had to do.

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a league’s distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there, because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:—

                   "Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo

                    Multa?"

     [Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?

       —Hor., Od., ii.  16, 17.]

for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition. One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son, as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best:

                    "‘Miser, O miser,’ aiunt, ‘omnia ademit

               Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.’"

     ["‘Wretch that I am,’ they cry, ‘one fatal day has deprived me of

     all joys of life.’"—Lucretius, iii. 911.]

And the builder,

              Manuet, says he, "opera interrupta, minaeque

               Murorum ingentes."

     ["The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls

     unmade."—AEneid, iv.  88.]

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action:

               Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.

     [When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.

       —Ovid, Amor., ii.  10, 36.]

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:

         "Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum

          jam desiderium rerum super insidet una."

     ["They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess

     things."—Lucretius, iii.  913.]

We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours. To this purpose it was that men first appointed the places of sepulture adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to accustom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end, that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies should put us in mind of our frail condition:

              "Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede

               Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira

               Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum

               Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis."

     ["It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and

     to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with

     the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and

     covering the tables with blood."—Silius Italicus, xi. 51.]

And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company with a great image of death, by one that cried out to them, Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead; so it is my custom to have death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth. Neither is there anything of which I am so inquisitive, and delight to inform myself, as the manner of men’s deaths, their words, looks, and bearing; nor any places in history I am so intent upon; and it is manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a particular fancy for that subject. If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for another and less profitable end.

Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other. And, as I have experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death the same.

Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily decay. What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better days?

               Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.

     [Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!—-Maximian, vel

     Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.]

Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet alive.—[Seneca, Ep., 77.]—Should a man fall into this condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an insensible pace, step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than the final dissolution of a languishing body, than the death of old age; forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is troublesome and painful. The body, bent and bowed, has less force to support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is, that we are to raise her up firm and erect against the power of this adversary. For, as it is impossible she should ever be at rest, whilst she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may boast (which is a thing as it were surpassing human condition) that it is impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance, should inhabit or have any place in her:

              "Non vulnus instants Tyranni

               Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster

               Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,

               Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus."

     ["Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul,

     nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the

     strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves."

      —Hor., Od., iii.  3, 3.]

She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of necessity, shame, poverty, and all the other injuries of fortune. Let us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains:

                              "In manicis et

               Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo.

               Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet.  Opinor,

               Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est."

          ["I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a

          savage keeper.—A god will when I ask Him, set me free.

          This god I think is death.  Death is the term of all things."

           —Hor., Ep., i.  16, 76.]

Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt of death. Not only the argument of reason invites us to it—for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? —but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable? To him that told Socrates, The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to death; And nature them, said he.—[Socrates was not condemned to death by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]— What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched? Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more. Aristotle tells us that there are certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning, die in their youth, and those that die at five in the evening, in their decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe? The most and the least, of ours, in comparison with eternity, or yet with the duration of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less ridiculous.—[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.]

But nature compels us to it. Go out of this world, says she, "as you entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of the life of the world.

                    "Inter se mortales mutua vivunt

                    ................................

                    Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt."

     ["Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners

     in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the

     next comer.—" Lucretius, ii.  75, 78.]

"Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things? ‘Tis the condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave:

          Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit.

     [The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.

      —Seneca, Her.  Fur., 3 Chor.  874.]

          Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.

     [As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.

       —Manilius, Ast., iv.  16.]

"All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

               Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?

     ["Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?

     "Lucretius, iii.  951.]

"If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you desire longer to keep it?

               "‘Cur amplius addere quaeris,

          Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?’

     ["Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and

     be again tormented?"—Lucretius, iii. 914.]

"Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity:

               "‘Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes

               Aspicient.’

     [Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.

      —Manilius, i. 529.]

"And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same thing:

               "‘Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.’

     [We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.

      —Lucretius, iii. 1093.]

               "‘Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.’

     [The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.

      —Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.]

"I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations:

             "‘Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque

               Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.’

     ["I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: ‘tis the same

     thing over and over again."—Lucretius iii. 957]

"Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much fear, as if you had died at nurse:

               "‘Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,

          Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.’

     ["Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will

     remain eternal."—Lucretius, iii. 1103]

"And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason to be displeased.

          "‘In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te,

          Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum,

          Stansque jacentem.’

     ["Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to

     lament you dead, standing on your grave."—Idem., ibid., 898.]

"Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about:

          "‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit.

          ..................................................

          "‘Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.’

"Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing.

        "‘Multo .  .  .  mortem minus ad nos esse putandium,

          Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.’

"Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the world; nor does it any more concern you.

         "‘Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas

          Temporis aeterni fuerit.’

     [Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.

      —Lucretius iii. 985]

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

          "‘Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.’

          [All things, then, life over, must follow thee.

           —Lucretius, iii.  981.]

"Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you die:

        "‘Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est,

          Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris

          Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.’

     ["No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which

     there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of

     death and funerals."—Lucretius, v.  579.]

"To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must, therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why dost thou complain of me and of destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee to govern us, or for us to govern thee? Though, peradventure, thy age may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell. Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with

the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain. It was I that taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ‘Why then he did not die?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it is indifferent.’—[Diogenes Laertius, i. 35.]—Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it." These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches.

I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others, should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor; and so ‘tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

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