Iatros allon autos elkesi bruon.

  He boasts of healing poor and rich,
  Yet is himself all over itch.

This made him boldly say, that he did not desire to be esteemed a physician, if from his twenty-eighth year to his old age he had not lived in perfect health, except some ephemerous fevers, of which he soon rid himself; yet he was not naturally of the soundest temper, his stomach being evidently bad.  Indeed, as he saith, lib. 5, De Sanitate tuenda, that physician will hardly be thought very careful of the health of others who neglects his own.  Asclepiades boasted yet more than this; for he said that he had articled with fortune not to be reputed a physician if he could be said to have been sick since he began to practise physic to his latter age, which he reached, lusty in all his members and victorious over fortune; till at last the old gentleman unluckily tumbled down from the top of a certain ill-propped and rotten staircase, and so there was an end of him.

If by some disaster health is fled from your worships to the right or to the left, above or below, before or behind, within or without, far or near, on this side or the other side, wheresoever it be, may you presently, with the help of the Lord, meet with it.  Having found it, may you immediately claim it, seize it, and secure it.  The law allows it; the king would have it so; nay, you have my advice for it.  Neither more nor less than the law-makers of old did fully empower a master to claim and seize his runaway servant wherever he might be found.  Odds-bodikins, is it not written and warranted by the ancient customs of this noble, so rich, so flourishing realm of France, that the dead seizes the quick?  See what has been declared very lately in that point by that learned, wise, courteous, humane and just civilian, Andrew Tiraqueau, one of the judges in the most honourable court of Parliament at Paris.  Health is our life, as Ariphron the Sicyonian wisely has it; without health life is not life, it is not living life:  abios bios, bios abiotos.  Without health life is only a languishment and an image of death.  Therefore, you that want your health, that is to say, that are dead, seize the quick; secure life to yourselves, that is to say, health.

I have this hope in the Lord, that he will hear our supplications, considering with what faith and zeal we pray, and that he will grant this our wish because it is moderate and mean.  Mediocrity was held by the ancient sages to be golden, that is to say, precious, praised by all men, and pleasing in all places.  Read the sacred Bible, you will find the prayers of those who asked moderately were never unanswered.  For example, little dapper Zaccheus, whose body and relics the monks of St. Garlick, near Orleans, boast of having, and nickname him St. Sylvanus; he only wished to see our blessed Saviour near Jerusalem.  It was but a small request, and no more than anybody then might pretend to.  But alas! he was but