ks my banks,
I lie open, and am drowned without remedy. Epicurus says, that a wise
man can never become a fool; I have an opinion reverse to this sentence,
which is, that he who has once been a very fool, will never after be very
wise. God grants me cold according to my cloth, and passions
proportionable to the means I have to withstand them: nature having laid
me open on the one side, has covered me on the other; having disarmed me
of strength, she has armed me with insensibility and an apprehension that
is regular, or, if you will, dull.

I cannot now long endure (and when I was young could much less) either
coach, litter, or boat, and hate all other riding but on horseback, both
in town and country. But I can bear a litter worse than a coach; and, by
the same reason, a rough agitation upon the water, whence fear is
produced, better than the motions of a calm. At the little jerks of
oars, stealing the vessel from under us, I find, I know not how, both my
head and my stomach disordered; neither-can I endure to sit upon a
tottering chair. When the sail or the current carries us equally, or
that we are towed, the equal agitation does not disturb me at all; 'tis
an interrupted motion that offends me, and most of all when most slow: I
cannot otherwise express it. The physicians have ordered me to squeeze
and gird myself about the bottom of the belly with a napkin to remedy
this evil; which however I have not tried, being accustomed to wrestle
with my own defects, and overcome them myself.

Would my memory serve me, I should not think my time ill spent in setting
down here the infinite variety that history presents us of the use of
chariots in the service of war: various, according to the nations and
according to the age; in my opinion, of great necessity and effect; so
that it is a wonder that we have lost all knowledge of them. I will only
say this, that very lately, in our fathers' time, the Hungarians made
very advantageous use of them against the Turks; having in every one of
them a targetter and a musketeer, and a number of harquebuses piled ready
and loaded, and all covered with a pavesade like a galliot--[Canvas
spread along the side of a ship of war, in action to screen the movements
of those on board.]--They formed the front of their battle with three
thousand such coaches, and after the cannon had played, made them all
pour in their shot upon the enemy, who had to swallow that volley before
they tasted of