A servant of mine whom I employed to transcribe for me, thought he had got a prize by stealing several pieces from me, wherewith he was best pleased; but it is my comfort that he will be no greater a gainer than I shall be a loser by the theft.  I am grown older by seven or eight years since I began; nor has it been without same new acquisition:  I have, in that time, by the liberality of years, been acquainted with the stone:  their commerce and long converse do not well pass away without some such inconvenience.  I could have been glad that of other infirmities age has to present long-lived men withal, it had chosen some one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not possibly have laid upon me a disease for which, even from my infancy, I have had so great a horror; and it is, in truth, of all the accidents of old age, that of which I have ever been most afraid.  I have often thought with myself that I went on too far, and that in so long a voyage I should at last run myself into some disadvantage; I perceived, and have often enough declared, that it was time to depart, and that life should be cut off in the sound and living part, according to the surgeon’s rule in amputations; and that nature made him pay very strict usury who did not in due time pay the principal.  And yet I was so far from being ready, that in the eighteen months’ time or thereabout that I have been in this uneasy condition, I have so inured myself to it as to be content to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope:  so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no condition so wretched they will not accept, provided they may live!  Hear Maecenas: 

                        “Debilem facito manu,
                         Debilem pede, coxa,
                         Lubricos quate dentes;
                         Vita dum superest, bene est.”

     ["Cripple my hand, foot, hip; shake out my loose teeth:  while
     there’s life, ’tis well.”—­Apud Seneca, Ep., 101.]

And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he could hear of to death, to deliver them, as he pretended, from the painful life they lived.  For there was not one of them who would not rather have been thrice a leper than be not.  And Antisthenes the Stoic, being very sick, and crying out, “Who will deliver me from these evils?” Diogenes, who had come to visit him, “This,” said he, presenting him a knife, “soon enough, if thou wilt.”—­“I do not mean from my life,” he replied, “but from my sufferings.”  The sufferings that only attack the mind, I am not so sensible of as most other men; and this partly out of judgment, for the world looks upon several things as dreadful or to be avoided at the expense of life, that are almost indifferent to me:  partly, through a dull and insensible complexion I have in accidents which do not point-blank hit me;