nes,

*

nor do I altogether allow that rodomon

tado of Lucan;

Cœlo tegitur, qui non habet urnam

He that unburied lies wants not his hearse,
For unto him a tomb 's the universe;

but commend in my calmer judgments, those ingenuous intentions, that desire to sleep by the urns of their fathers, and strive to go the nearest way unto corruption. I do not envy the temper of crows and daws, nor the numerous and weary days of our fathers before the flood. If there be any truth in astrology, I may outlive a jubilee. As yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years; and yet, excepting one, have seen the ashes, and left under ground, all the kings of Europe; have been contemporary to three emperors, four grand seigniors, and as many popes. Methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun; I have shaken hands with delight. In my warm blood and canicular days I perceive I do anticipate the vices of age; the

* Who willed his friend not to bury him, but hang him up with a staff in his hand to fright away the crows.

† As Theophrastus did, who dying, accused nature for giving them, to whom it could not be of any concernment, so large a life; and to man, whom it much concerned, so short a one. Cic. Tusc, Quæst, lib. 3.

world to me is but a dream or mock-show, and we all therein but pantalones and antics, to my severer contemplations. [[

It is not, I confess, an unlawful prayer to desire to surpass the days of our Saviour, or wish to outlive that age wherein he thought fittest to die. Yet if (as divinity affirms) there shall be no gray hairs in heaven, but all shall rise in the perfect state of men, we do but outlive those perfections in this world, to be recalled unto them by a greater miracle in the next, and run on here but to be retrograde hereafter. Were there any hopes to outlive vice, or a point to be superannuated from sin, it were worthy our knees to implore the days of Methuselah. But age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits, and (like diseases) brings on incurable vices; for every day as we grow weaker in age, we grow stronger in sin; and the number of our days doth but make our sins innumerable. The same vice committed at sixteen, is not the same, though it agrees in all other circumstances, as at forty, but swells and doubles from that circumstance of our age, wherein, besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of our judgment cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon. Every sin, the oftener it is committed, the

more it acquireth in the quality of evil; as it succeeds in time, so it proceeds in degrees of badness; for as they proceed, they ever multiply, and like figures in arithmetic, the last stands for more than all that went before it. And though I think no man can live well once, but he that could live twice, yet for my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my days; not upon Cicero's ground, because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse. I find my growing judgment daily instruct me how to be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity makes me daily do worse. I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth. I committed many then, because I was a child, and because I commit them still, I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of son's bath before threescore.*

And truly there goes a great deal of providence to produce a man's life unto threescore. There is more required than an able temper for those years. Though the radical humor contain

* Eson was the son of Jason, and, at his request, was by Medea, by the means of this bath, restored to his youth. Ingredients that went into it, and the description of Medea's performance, Ovid gives you, lib. 7, Metam.

in it sufficient oil for seventy, yet I perceive in some it gives no light past thirty. Men assign not all the causes of long life that write whole books thereof. They that found themselves on the radical balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is therefore a secret glome or bottom of our days. 'T was his wisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accomplisheth them, wherein the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of God, in a secret and disputed way, do execute his will. Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that die about thirty. They fall but like the whole world, whose solid and well composed substance must not expect the duration and period of its constitution. When all things are completed in it, its age is accomplished; and the last and general fever may as naturally destroy it before six thousand, as me before forty. There is therefore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature. We are not only ignorant in antipathies and occult qualities; our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our days is drawn by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible; wherein, though we confess our ignorance, I am sure we do not err if we say it is the hand of God.

I am much taken with two verses of Lucan, since I have been able not only, as we do at school, to construe, but understand.

Victurosque Dei celant, ut vivere durent,
Felix esse mori.

We're all deluded, vainly searching ways
To make us happy by the length of days;
For cunningly to make 's protract this breath,]
The gods conceal the happiness of death.

There be many excellent strains in that poet,' wherewith his stoical genius hath liberally supplied him; and truly there are singular pieces in the philosophy of Zeno, and doctrine of the Stoics, which I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current divinity. Yet herein are they in extremes, that can allow a man to be his own assassin, and so highly extol the end and suicide of Cato. This is indeed not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valor to contemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live; and herein religion hath taught us a noble example. For all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scævola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job; and sure there is no torture to the rack of a disease, nor any poniards in death itself, like those in the way or prologue to it. "Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihil curo; " I would not die, but