our own custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out.  We may be straitened for earth to live upon, but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus answered the Romans.”—­[Tacitus, Annal., xiii. 56.]—­Why dost thou complain of this world? it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.  There needs no more to die but to will to die: 

               “Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit deus. 
               Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
               At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.”

     ["Death is everywhere:  heaven has well provided for that.  Any one
     may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death.  To death
     there are a thousand avenues.”—­Seneca, Theb:, i, I, 151.]

Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure of all; ’tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very often to be sought.  It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s the end of the clue.  The most voluntary death is the finest.  Life depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.  We ought not to accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this.  Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; ’tis folly to be concerned by any such apprehension.  Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.  The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually.  Why is not the jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein?  For a desperate disease a desperate cure.  Servius the grammarian, being tormented with the gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his legs, to deprive them of their sense; let them be gouty at their will, so they were insensible of pain.  God gives us leave enough to go when He is pleased to reduce us to such a condition that to live is far worse than to die.  ’Tis weakness to truckle under infirmities, but it’s madness to nourish them.  The Stoics say, that it is living according to nature in a wise man to, take his leave of life, even in the height of prosperity, if he do it opportunely; and in a fool to prolong it, though he be miserable, provided he be not indigent of those things which they repute to be according to nature.  As I do not offend the law against thieves when I embezzle my own money and cut my own purse; nor that against incendiaries when I burn my own wood; so am I not under the lash of those made against murderers for having deprived myself of my own life.  Hegesias said, that as the condition of life did, so the condition of death ought to depend upon our own choice.  And Diogenes meeting the philosopher Speusippus, so blown up with an inveterate dropsy that he was fain to be carried in a litter, and by him saluted with the compliment, “I wish you good health.”  “No health to thee,” replied the other, “who art content to live in such a condition.”