Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey being continually before their eyes, would not alter and deprave their palate from tasting these regalios?

         “Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum
          Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura.”

["He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring
his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by
thinking of the blow to come.”—­Claudianus, in Ruf., ii. 137.]

The end of our race is death; ’tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague?  The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness?  They must bridle the ass by the tail: 

          “Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,”

     ["Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards”—­Lucretius, iv. 474]

’tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall.  They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil.  And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it.

The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, “Such a one has lived,” or “Such a one has ceased to live” —­[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c. 22:]—­for, provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation.  And from them it is that we have borrowed our expression, “The late Monsieur such and such a one.”—­["feu Monsieur un tel.”] Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our money.  I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the year the 1st of January,—­[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles ix. in 1563.  Previously the year commenced at Easter, so that the 1st January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]—­and it is now but just fifteen days since I was complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make account to live, at least, as many more.  In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly.  But what?  Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come.  Fool that thou art! who has assured unto thee the term of life?