29.  He lived to give a third or fourth edition of it, and after having passed his hundredth year, died without pain or agony, and like one who falls asleep.  The treatise I mention has been taken notice of by several eminent authors, and is written with such a spirit of cheerfulness, religion and good sense, as are the natural concomitants of temperance and sobriety.  The mixture of the old man in it is rather a recommendation than a discredit to it.

The Duty of Secrecy.

1.  It is related by Quintus Curtius, that the Persians always conceived a lasting and invincible contempt of a man who had violated the laws of secrecy:  for they thought that, however he might be deficient in the qualities requisite to actual excellence, the negative virtues at least were always in his power, and though he perhaps could not speak well if he was to try, it was still easy for him not to speak.

2.  In this opinion of the easiness of secrecy, they seem to have considered it as opposed, not to treachery, but loquacity, and to have conceived the man, whom they thus censured, not frighted by menaces to reveal, or bribed by promises to betray, but incited by the mere pleasure of talking, or some other motive equally trivial, to lay open his heart with reflection, and to let whatever he knew slip from him, only for want of power to retain it.

3.  Whether, by their settled and avowed scorn of thoughtless talkers, the Persians were able to diffuse to any great extent, the virtue of taciturnity, we are hindered by the distress of those times from being able to discover, there being very few memoirs remaining of the court of Persepolis, nor any distinct accounts handed down to us of their office-clerks, their ladies of the bed-chamber, their attornies, their chamber-maids, or the foot-men.

4.  In these latter ages, though the old animosity against a prattler is still retained, it appears wholly to have lost its effects upon the conduct of mankind; for secrets are so seldom kept, that it may with some reason be doubted, whether the ancients were not mistaken in their first postulate, whether the quality of retention be so generally bestowed, and whether a secret has not some subtile volatility, by which it escapes almost imperceptibly at the smallest vent; or some power of fermentation, by which it expands itself so as to burst the heart that will not give it way.

5.  Those that study either the body or the mind of man, very often find the most specious and pleasing theory falling under the weight of contrary experience:  and instead of gratifying their vanity by inferring effects from causes, they are always reduced at last to conjecture causes from effects.  That it is easy to be secret, the speculatist can demonstrate in his retreat, and therefore thinks himself justified in placing confidence:  the man of the world knows, that, whether difficult or not, it is not uncommon, and therefore finds himself rather inclined to search after the reason of this universal failure in one of the most important duties of society.