and myself set some discourse on foot, the most remote I can contrive from my present condition.  I can do anything upon a sudden endeavour, but it must not continue long.  Oh, what pity ’tis I have not the faculty of that dreamer in Cicero, who dreaming he was lying with a wench, found he had discharged his stone in the sheets.  My pains strangely deaden my appetite that way.  In the intervals from this excessive torment, when my ureters only languish without any great dolor, I presently feel myself in my wonted state, forasmuch as my soul takes no other alarm but what is sensible and corporal, which I certainly owe to the care I have had of preparing myself by meditation against such accidents: 

                                   “Laborum,
               Nulla mihi nova nunc facies inopinave surgit;
               Omnia praecepi, atque animo mecum ante peregi.”

     ["No new shape of suffering can arise new or unexpected; I have
     anticipated all, and acted them over beforehand in my mind.” 
     —­AEneid, vi. 103.]

I am, however, a little roughly handled for an apprentice, and with a sudden and sharp alteration, being fallen in an instant from a very easy and happy condition of life into the most uneasy and painful that can be imagined.  For besides that it is a disease very much to be feared in itself, it begins with me after a more sharp and severe manner than it is used to do with other men.  My fits come so thick upon me that I am scarcely ever at ease; yet I have hitherto kept my mind so upright that, provided I can still continue it, I find myself in a much better condition of life than a thousand others, who have no fewer nor other disease but what they create to themselves for want of meditation.

There is a certain sort of crafty humility that springs from presumption, as this, for example, that we confess our ignorance in many things, and are so courteous as to acknowledge that there are in the works of nature some qualities and conditions that are imperceptible to us, and of which our understanding cannot discover the means and causes; by this so honest and conscientious declaration we hope to obtain that people shall also believe us as to those that we say we do understand.  We need not trouble ourselves to seek out foreign miracles and difficulties; methinks, amongst the things that we ordinarily see, there are such incomprehensible wonders as surpass all difficulties of miracles.  What a wonderful thing it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced should carry in itself the impression not only of the bodily form, but even of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!  Where can that drop of fluid matter contain that infinite number of forms? and how can they carry on these resemblances with so precarious and irregular a process that the son shall be like his great-grandfather, the nephew like his uncle?  In the family of Lepidus at Rome there were three, not successively but by intervals, who were born with the same eye covered with a cartilage.  At Thebes there was a race that carried from their mother’s womb the form of the head of a lance, and he who was not born so was looked upon as illegitimate.  And Aristotle says that in a certain nation, where the women were in common, they assigned the children to their fathers by their resemblance.