is wanting to my custom, I reckon is wanting to me; and I should be almost as well content that they took away my life as cut me short in the way wherein I have so long lived.  I am no longer in condition for any great change, nor to put myself into a new and unwonted course, not even to augmentation.  ’Tis past the time for me to become other than what I am; and as I should complain of any great good hap that should now befall me, that it came not in time to be enjoyed: 

“Quo mihi fortunas, si non conceditur uti?”

     ["What is the good fortune to me, if it is not granted to me
     to use it.”—­Horace, Ep., i. 5, 12.]

so should I complain of any inward acquisition.  It were almost better never, than so late, to become an honest man, and well fit to live, when one has no longer to live.  I, who am about to make my exit out of the world, would easily resign to any newcomer, who should desire it, all the prudence I am now acquiring in the world’s commerce; after meat, mustard.  I have no need of goods of which I can make no use; of what use is knowledge to him who has lost his head?  ’Tis an injury and unkindness in fortune to tender us presents that will only inspire us with a just despite that we had them not in their due season.  Guide me no more; I can no longer go.  Of so many parts as make up a sufficiency, patience is the most sufficient.  Give the capacity of an excellent treble to the chorister who has rotten lungs, and eloquence to a hermit exiled into the deserts of Arabia.  There needs no art to help a fall; the end finds itself of itself at the conclusion of every affair.  My world is at an end, my form expired; I am totally of the past, and am bound to authorise it, and to conform my outgoing to it.  I will here declare, by way of example, that the Pope’s late ten days’ diminution

     [Gregory xiii., in 1582, reformed the Calendar, and, in consequence,
     in France they all at once passed from the 9th to the 20th
     December.]

has taken me so aback that I cannot well reconcile myself to it; I belong to the years wherein we kept another kind of account.  So ancient and so long a custom challenges my adherence to it, so that I am constrained to be somewhat heretical on that point incapable of any, though corrective, innovation.  My imagination, in spite of my teeth, always pushes me ten days forward or backward, and is ever murmuring in my ears:  “This rule concerns those who are to begin to be.”  If health itself, sweet as it is, returns to me by fits, ’tis rather to give me cause of regret than possession of it; I have no place left to keep it in.  Time leaves me; without which nothing can be possessed.  Oh, what little account should I make of those great elective dignities that I see in such esteem in the world, that are never conferred but upon men who are taking leave of it; wherein they do not so much regard how well the man will discharge his trust, as how short his administration will be:  from the very entry they look at the exit.  In short, I am about finishing this man, and not rebuilding another.  By long use, this form is in me turned into substance, and fortune into nature.