sight of the world and keep them to myself. Let me shrink and draw up
myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without
hanging upon them. I should endanger them in so slippery a passage: 'tis
time to turn my back to company.

"But, in these travels, you will be taken ill in some wretched place,
where nothing can be had to relieve you." I always carry most things
necessary about me; and besides, we cannot evade Fortune if she once
resolves to attack us. I need nothing extraordinary when I am sick.
I will not be beholden to my bolus to do that for me which nature cannot.
At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down,
whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile
myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by
so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much
the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or
counsellor than of a physician. What I have not settled of my affairs
when I was in health, let no one expect I should do it when I am sick.
What I will do for the service of death is always done; I durst not so
much as one day defer it; and if nothing be done, 'tis as much as to say
either that doubt hindered my choice (and sometimes 'tis well chosen not
to choose), or that I was positively resolved not to do anything at all.

I write my book for few men and for few years. Had it been matter of
duration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to the
continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who
can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence?
It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it is
altered above one-half. We say that it is now perfect; and every age
says the same of its own. I shall hardly trust to that, so long as it
varies and changes as it does. 'Tis for good and useful writings to
rivet it to them, and its reputation will go according to the fortune of
our state. For which reason I am not afraid to insert in it several
private articles, which will spend their use amongst the men that are now
living, and that concern the particular knowledge of some who will see
further into them than every common reader. I will not, after all, as I
often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me: "He judged, he
lived so and so; he would have done this or that; could he have spoken
when he was d