These are my three very true stories, which I find as entertaining and as tragic as any of those we make out of our own heads wherewith to amuse the common people; and I wonder that they who are addicted to such relations, do not rather cull out ten thousand very fine stories, which are to be found in books, that would save them the trouble of invention, and be more useful and diverting; and he who would make a whole and connected body of them would need to add nothing of his own, but the connection only, as it were the solder of another metal; and might by this means embody a great many true events of all sorts, disposing and diversifying them according as the beauty of the work should require, after the same manner, almost, as Ovid has made up his Metamorphoses of the infinite number of various fables.

In the last couple, this is, moreover, worthy of consideration, that Paulina voluntarily offered to lose her life for the love of her husband, and that her husband had formerly also forborne to die for the love of her.  We may think there is no just counterpoise in this exchange; but, according to his stoical humour, I fancy he thought he had done as much for her, in prolonging his life upon her account, as if he had died for her.  In one of his letters to Lucilius, after he has given him to understand that, being seized with an ague in Rome, he presently took coach to go to a house he had in the country, contrary to his wife’s opinion, who would have him stay, and that he had told her that the ague he was seized with was not a fever of the body but of the place, it follows thus:  “She let me go,” says he, “giving me a strict charge of my health.  Now I, who know that her life is involved in mine, begin to make much of myself, that I may preserve her.  And I lose the privilege my age has given me, of being more constant and resolute in many things, when I call to mind that in this old fellow there is a young girl who is interested in his health.  And since I cannot persuade her to love me more courageously, she makes me more solicitously love myself:  for we must allow something to honest affections, and, sometimes, though occasions importune us to the contrary, we must call back life, even though it be with torment:  we must hold the soul fast in our teeth, since the rule of living, amongst good men, is not so long as they please, but as long as they ought.  He that loves not his wife nor his friend so well as to prolong his life for them, but will obstinately die, is too delicate and too effeminate:  the soul must impose this upon itself, when the utility of our friends so requires; we must sometimes lend ourselves to our friends, and when we would die for ourselves must break that resolution for them.  ’Tis a testimony of grandeur of courage to return to life for the consideration of another, as many excellent persons have done:  and ’tis a mark of singular good nature to preserve old age (of which the greatest convenience is the