history I am so intent upon; and it is manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a particular fancy for that subject.  If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men:  he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.  Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for another and less profitable end.

Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push.  Let them say what they will:  to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration?  Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us:  if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life.  I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror.  Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other.  And, as I have experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them.  The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death the same.

Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily decay.  What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better days?

“Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.”

     ["Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!”—–­Maximian, vel
     Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.]

Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, “Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet alive.”—­[Seneca, Ep., 77.]—­Should a man fall into this condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such a change:  but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an insensible pace,