in counterfeiting have suffered themselves to be caught indeed, and who have quitted the true and original affection for the feigned:  and so have learned that they who find their affections well placed are fools to consent to this disguise:  the public and favourable reception being only reserved for this pretended lover, one may conclude him a fellow of very little address and less wit, if he does not in the end put himself into your place, and you into his; this is precisely to cut out and make up a shoe for another to draw on.

A little thing will turn and divert us, because a little thing holds us.  We do not much consider subjects in gross and singly; they are little and superficial circumstances, or images that touch us, and the outward useless rinds that peel off from the subjects themselves: 

         “Folliculos ut nunc teretes aestate cicadae
          Linquunt.”

["As husks we find grasshoppers leave behind them in summer.” 
—­Lucretius, v. 801.]

Even Plutarch himself laments his daughter for the little apish tricks of her infancy.—­[Consolation to his Wife on the Death of their Daughter, c.  I.]—­The remembrance of a farewell, of the particular grace of an action, of a last recommendation, afflict us.  The sight of Caesar’s robe troubled all Rome, which was more than his death had done.  Even the sound of names ringing in our ears, as “my poor master,”—­“my faithful friend,”—­“alas, my dear father,” or, “my sweet daughter,” afflict us.  When these repetitions annoy me, and that I examine it a little nearer, I find ’tis no other but a grammatical and word complaint; I am only wounded with the word and tone, as the exclamations of preachers very often work more upon their auditory than their reasons, and as the pitiful eyes of a beast killed for our service; without my weighing or penetrating meanwhile into the true and solid essence of my subject: 

“His se stimulis dolor ipse lacessit.”

          ["With these incitements grief provokes itself.” 
          —­Lucretius, ii. 42.]

These are the foundations of our mourning.

The obstinacy of my stone to all remedies especially those in my bladder, has sometimes thrown me into so long suppressions of urine for three or four days together, and so near death, that it had been folly to have hoped to evade it, and it was much rather to have been desired, considering the miseries I endure in those cruel fits.  Oh, that good emperor, who caused criminals to be tied that they might die for want of urination, was a great master in the hangman’s’ science!  Finding myself in this condition, I considered by how many light causes and objects imagination nourished in me the regret of life; of what atoms the weight and difficulty of this dislodging was composed in my soul; to how many idle and frivolous thoughts we give way in so great an affair; a dog, a horse, a book, a glass, and what not, were considered in my