sleep, without dreams,
without disturbance?--That we and our children were born to die,--but
neither of us born to be slaves.--No--there I mistake; that was part of
Eleazer's oration, as recorded by Josephus (de Bell. Judaic)--Eleazer
owns he had it from the philosophers of India; in all likelihood
Alexander the Great, in his irruption into India, after he had over-run
Persia, amongst the many things he stole,--stole that sentiment also;
by which means it was carried, if not all the way by himself (for we
all know he died at Babylon), at least by some of his maroders, into
Greece,--from Greece it got to Rome,--from Rome to France,--and from
France to England:--So things come round.--

By land carriage, I can conceive no other way.--

By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges into the
Sinus Gangeticus, or Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian Sea; and
following the course of trade (the way from India by the Cape of Good
Hope being then unknown), might be carried with other drugs and spices
up the Red Sea to Joddah, the port of Mekka, or else to Tor or Sues,
towns at the bottom of the gulf; and from thence by karrawans to Coptos,
but three days journey distant, so down the Nile directly to Alexandria,
where the Sentiment would be landed at the very foot of the great
stair-case of the Alexandrian library,--and from that store-house it
would be fetched.--Bless me! what a trade was driven by the learned in
those days!

Chapter 3.XIII.

--Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job's (in case there
ever was such a man--if not, there's an end of the matter.--

Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in
fixing the precise aera in which so great a man lived;--whether, for
instance, before or after the patriarchs, &c.--to vote, therefore, that
he never lived at all, is a little cruel,--'tis not doing as they would
be done by,--happen that as it may)--My father, I say, had a way, when
things went extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally
of his impatience,--of wondering why he was begot,--wishing himself
dead;--sometimes worse:--And when the provocation ran high, and grief
touched his lips with more than ordinary powers--Sir, you scarce could
have distinguished him from Socrates himself.--Every word would breathe
the sentiments of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all its
issues; for which reason, though my mother was a woman of no deep
reading