would all around discern how many
grievances and calamities our whole life is on every side encompassed
with: how unclean our birth, how troublesome our tendance in the cradle,
how liable our childhood is to a thousand misfortunes, how toilsome and
full of drudgery our riper years, how heavy and uncomfortable our old
age, and lastly, how unwelcome the unavoidableness of death. Farther, in
every course of life how many wracks there may be of torturing diseases,
how many unhappy accidents may casually occur, how many unexpected
disasters may arise, and what strange alterations may one moment
produce? Not to mention such miseries as men are mutually the cause of,
as poverty, imprisonment, slander, reproach, revenge, treachery, malice,
cousenage, deceit, and so many more, as to reckon them all would be as
puzzling arithmetic as the numbering of the sands.

[Illustration: 138]

How mankind became environed with such hard circumstances, or what deity
imposed these plagues, as a penance on rebellious mortals, I am not
now at leisure to enquire: but whoever seriously takes them into
consideration must needs commend the valour of the Milesian virgins, who
voluntarily killed themselves to get rid of a troublesome world: and
how many wise men have taken the same course of becoming their own
executioners; among whom, not to mention Diogenes, Xenocrates, Cato,
Cassius, Brutus, and other heroes, the self-denying Chiron is never
enough to be commended; who, when he was offered by Apollo the privilege
of being exempted from death, and living on to the world's end, he
refused the enticing proposal, as deservedly thinking it a punishment
rather than a reward.

But if all were thus wise you see how soon the world would be unpeopled,
and what need there would be of a second Prometheus, to plaister up
the decayed image of mankind. I therefore come and stand in this gap
of danger, and prevent farther mischief; partly by ignorance, partly by
inadvertence; by the oblivion of whatever would be grating to remember,
and the hopes of whatever may be grateful to expect, together palliating
all griefs with an intermixture of pleasure; whereby I make men so far
from being weary of their lives, that when their thread is spun to its
full length, they are yet unwilling to die, and mighty hardly brought
to take their last farewell of their friends. Thus some decrepit old
fellows, that look as hollow as the grave into which they are falling,
that ratt