stroys! To die by a bullet is the soldier's daily bread;
but few men die by hail-shot. A man is more worth than to be sold for
single money; a life to be valued above a trifle. If this were a violent
shaking of the air by thunder or by cannon, in that case the air is
condensed above the thickness of water, of water baked into ice, almost
petrified, almost made stone, and no wonder that kills; but that which
is but a vapour, and a vapour not forced but breathed, should kill, that
our nurse should overlay us, and air that nourishes us should destroy
us, but that it is a half atheism to murmur against Nature, who is God's
immediate commissioner, who would not think himself miserable to be put
into the hands of Nature, who does not only set him up for a mark for
others to shoot at, but delights herself to blow him up like a glass,
till she see him break, even with her own breath? Nay, if this
infectious vapour were sought for, or travelled to, as Pliny hunted
after the vapour of AEtna and dared and challenged Death in the form of a
vapour to do his worst, and felt the worst, he died; or if this vapour
were met withal in an ambush, and we surprised with it, out of a long
shut well, or out of a new opened mine, who would lament, who would
accuse, when we had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but
fortune, who is less than a vapour? But when ourselves are the well
that breathes out this exhalation, the oven that spits out this fiery
smoke, the mine that spews out this suffocating and strangling damp, who
can ever, after this, aggravate his sorrow by this circumstance, that it
was his neighbour, his familiar friend, his brother, that destroyed him,
and destroyed him with a whispering and a calumniating breath, when we
ourselves do it to ourselves by the same means, kill ourselves with our
own vapours? Or if these occasions of this self-destruction had any
contribution from our own wills, any assistance from our own intentions,
nay, from our own errors, we might divide the rebuke, and chide
ourselves as much as them. Fevers upon wilful distempers of drink and
surfeits, consumptions upon intemperances and licentiousness, madness
upon misplacing or overbending our natural faculties, proceed from
ourselves, and so as that ourselves are in the plot, and we are not only
passive, but active too, to our own destruction. But what have I done,
either to breed or to breathe these vapours? They tell me it is my
melancholy; did I infus