Labour and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless, by I know not what natural conjunction.  Socrates says, that some god tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being able to do it; he bethought him at least to couple them by the tail.  Metrodorus said, that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure.  I know not whether or no he intended anything else by that saying; but for my part, I am of opinion that there is design, consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy.  I say, that besides ambition, which may also have a stroke in the business, there is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.  Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?

“Est quaedam flere voluptas;”

               ["’Tis a certain kind of pleasure to weep.” 
               —­Ovid, Trist., iv. 3, 27.]

and one Attalus in Seneca says, that the memory of our lost friends is as grateful to us, as bitterness in wine, when too old, is to the palate: 

                    “Minister vetuli, puer, Falerni
                    Inger’ mi calices amariores”—­

     ["Boy, when you pour out old Falernian wine, the bitterest put
     into my bowl.”—­Catullus, xxvii.  I.]

and as apples that have a sweet tartness.

Nature discovers this confusion to us; painters hold that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too; and indeed, before the one or the other be finished, do but observe the painter’s manner of handling, and you will be in doubt to which of the two the design tends; and the extreme of laughter does at last bring tears: 

“Nullum sine auctoramento malum est.”

          ["No evil is without its compensation.”—­Seneca, Ep., 69.]

When I imagine man abounding with all the conveniences that are to be desired (let us put the case that all his members were always seized with a pleasure like that of generation, in its most excessive height) I feel him melting under the weight of his delight, and see him utterly unable to support so pure, so continual, and so universal a pleasure.  Indeed, he is running away whilst he is there, and naturally makes haste to escape, as from a place where he cannot stand firm, and where he is afraid of sinking.

When I religiously confess myself to myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and loyal a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—­would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself.  Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley.  Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to clear the law of all inconveniences: