“‘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