“To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying?  It must, therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other.  Why dost thou complain of me and of destiny?  Do we do thee any wrong?  Is it for thee to govern us, or for us to govern thee?  Though, peradventure, thy age may not be accomplished, yet thy life is:  a man of low stature is as much a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell.  Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its duration, his father Saturn.  Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I have already given him.  If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it:  and that you might be so established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain.  It was I that taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ’Why then he did not die?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ’it is indifferent.’—­[Diogenes Laertius, i. 35.]—­Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death.  Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest:  the last step is not the cause of lassitude:  it does not confess it.  Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.”  These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches.

I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others, should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than in others of better quality.  I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed