may as good cheap inform another, et bona tam sequitur, quam bona prima fuit; he need not despair, so long as the same master is to be had.  But was she good?  Had she been so tired peradventure as that Ephesian widow in Petronius, by some swaggering soldier, she might not have held out.  Many a man would have been willingly rid of his:  before thou wast bound, now thou art free; [3915]"and ’tis but a folly to love thy fetters though they be of gold.”  Come into a third place, you shall have an aged father sighing for a son, a pretty child;

[3916] “Impube pectus quale vel impia
        Molliret Thracum pectora.”

------“He now lies asleep,
Would make an impious Thracian weep.”

Or some fine daughter that died young, Nondum experta novi gaudia prima tori.  Or a forlorn son for his deceased father.  But why? Prior exiit, prior intravit, he came first, and he must go first. [3917]_Tu frustra pius, heu_, &c.  What, wouldst thou have the laws of nature altered, and him to live always?  Julius Caesar, Augustus, Alcibiades, Galen, Aristotle, lost their fathers young.  And why on the other side shouldst thou so heavily take the death of thy little son?

[3918] “Num quia nec fato, merita nec morte peribat,
Sed miser ante diem”------

he died before his time, perhaps, not yet come to the solstice of his age, yet was he not mortal?  Hear that divine [3919]Epictetus, “If thou covet thy wife, friends, children should live always, thou art a fool.”  He was a fine child indeed, dignus Apollineis lachrymis, a sweet, a loving, a fair, a witty child, of great hope, another Eteoneus, whom Pindarus the poet and Aristides the rhetorician so much lament; but who can tell whether he would have been an honest man?  He might have proved a thief, a rogue, a spendthrift, a disobedient son, vexed and galled thee more than all the world beside, he might have wrangled with thee and disagreed, or with his brothers, as Eteocles and Polynices, and broke thy heart; he is now gone to eternity, as another Ganymede, in the [3920]flower of his youth, “as if he had risen,” saith [3921]Plutarch, “from the midst of a feast” before he was drunk, “the longer he had lived, the worse he would have been,” et quo vita longior, (Ambrose thinks) culpa numerosior, more sinful, more to answer he would have had.  If he was naught, thou mayst be glad he is gone; if good, be glad thou hadst such a son.  Or art thou sure he was good?  It may be he was an hypocrite, as many are, and howsoever he spake thee fair, peradventure he prayed, amongst the rest that Icaro Menippus heard at Jupiter’s whispering place in Lucian, for his father’s death, because he now kept him short, he was to inherit much goods, and many fair manors after his decease.  Or put case he was very good, suppose the best, may not thy dead son expostulate with thee, as he did in the same [3922]Lucian, “why dost thou lament my death, or call me miserable that am much more happy than