ave some
excuse. Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful. What is
wanting to my custom, I reckon is wanting to me; and I should be almost
as well content that they took away my life as cut me short in the way
wherein I have so long lived. I am no longer in condition for any great
change, nor to put myself into a new and unwonted course, not even to
augmentation. 'Tis past the time for me to become other than what I am;
and as I should complain of any great good hap that should now befall me,
that it came not in time to be enjoyed:

"Quo mihi fortunas, si non conceditur uti?"

["What is the good fortune to me, if it is not granted to me
to use it."--Horace, Ep., i. 5, 12.]

so should I complain of any inward acquisition. It were almost better
never, than so late, to become an honest man, and well fit to live, when
one has no longer to live. I, who am about to make my exit out of the
world, would easily resign to any newcomer, who should desire it, all the
prudence I am now acquiring in the world's commerce; after meat, mustard.
I have no need of goods of which I can make no use; of what use is
knowledge to him who has lost his head? 'Tis an injury and unkindness in
fortune to tender us presents that will only inspire us with a just
despite that we had them not in their due season. Guide me no more; I
can no longer go. Of so many parts as make up a sufficiency, patience is
the most sufficient. Give the capacity of an excellent treble to the
chorister who has rotten lungs, and eloquence to a hermit exiled into the
deserts of Arabia. There needs no art to help a fall; the end finds
itself of itself at the conclusion of every affair. My world is at an
end, my form expired; I am totally of the past, and am bound to authorise
it, and to conform my outgoing to it. I will here declare, by way of
example, that the Pope's late ten days' diminution

[Gregory XIII., in 1582, reformed the Calendar, and, in consequence,
in France they all at once passed from the 9th to the 20th
December.]

has taken me so aback that I cannot well reconcile myself to it; I belong
to the years wherein we kept another kind of account. So ancient and so
long a custom challenges my adherence to it, so that I am constrained to
be somewhat heretical on that point incapable of any, though corrective,
innovation. My imagination, in spite of my teeth, always pushes me ten
days forward or backwa