e
spending or laying it up, to his other more quiet employments, and more
suitable both to his place and liking.

Plenty, then, and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of
them; and riches no more than glory or health have other beauty or
pleasure than he lends them by whom they are possessed.

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not
he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is
content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter
and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies
as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own
happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste and
colour from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us, not with their
heat, but our own, which they are fit to cover and nourish; he who would
shield therewith a cold body, would do the same service for the cold, for
so snow and ice are preserved. And, certes, after the same manner that
study is a torment to an idle man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard,
frugality to the spendthrift, and exercise to a lazy, tender-bred fellow,
so it is of all the rest. The things are not so painful and difficult of
themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so. To judge of
great, and high matters requires a suitable soul; otherwise we attribute
the vice to them which is really our own. A straight oar seems crooked
in the water it does not only import that we see the thing, but how and
after what manner we see it.

After all this, why, amongst so many discourses that by so many arguments
persuade men to despise death and to endure pain, can we not find out one
that helps us? And of so many sorts of imaginations as have so prevailed
upon others as to persuade them to do so, why does not every one apply
some one to himself, the most suitable to his own humour? If he cannot
digest a strong-working decoction to eradicate the evil, let him at least
take a lenitive to ease it:

["It is an effeminate and flimsy opinion, nor more so in pain than
in pleasure, in which, while we are at our ease, we cannot bear
without a cry the sting of a bee. The whole business is to commend
thyself."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 22.]

As to the rest, a man does not transgress philosophy by permitting the
acrimony of pains and human f