--"Lucretius, iv. 486.]

Shall we persuade our skins that the jerks of a whip agreeably tickle us,
or our taste that a potion of aloes is vin de Graves? Pyrrho's hog is
here in the same predicament with us; he is not afraid of death, 'tis
true, but if you beat him he will cry out to some purpose. Shall we
force the general law of nature, which in every living creature under
heaven is seen to tremble under pain? The very trees seem to groan under
the blows they receive. Death is only felt by reason, forasmuch as it is
the motion of an instant;

"Aut fuit, aut veniet; nihil est praesentis in illa."

["Death has been, or will come: there is nothing of the present in
it."--Estienne de la Boetie, Satires.]

"Morsque minus poenae, quam mora mortis, habet;"

["The delay of death is more painful than death itself."
--Ovid, Ep. Ariadne to Theseus, v. 42.]

a thousand beasts, a thousand men, are sooner dead than threatened. That
also which we principally pretend to fear in death is pain, its ordinary
forerunner: yet, if we may believe a holy father:

"Malam mortem non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem."

["That which follows death makes death bad."
--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. ii.]

And I should yet say, more probably, that neither that which goes before
nor that which follows after is at all of the appurtenances of death.

We excuse ourselves falsely: and I find by experience that it is rather
the impatience of the imagination of death that makes us impatient of
pain, and that we find it doubly grievous as it threatens us with death.
But reason accusing our cowardice for fearing a thing so sudden, so
inevitable, and so insensible, we take the other as the more excusable
pretence. All ills that carry no other danger along with them but simply
the evils themselves, we treat as things of no danger: the toothache or
the gout, painful as they are, yet being not reputed mortal, who reckons
them in the catalogue of diseases?

But let us presuppose that in death we principally regard the pain; as
also there is nothing to be feared in poverty but the miseries it brings
along with it of thirst, hunger, cold, heat, watching, and the other
inconveniences it makes us suffer, still we have nothing to do with
anything but pain. I will grant, and very willingly, that it is the
worst incident of our being (for I am the man upon earth who the most
hates a