are also qualities a little subject to
indiscretion; wherefore I shall say of this act of relieving nature, that
it is desirable to refer it to certain prescribed and nocturnal hours,
and compel one's self to this by custom, as I have done; but not to
subject one's self, as I have done in my declining years, to a particular
convenience of place and seat for that purpose, and make it troublesome
by long sitting; and yet, in the fouler offices, is it not in some
measure excusable to require more care and cleanliness?

"Naturt homo mundum et elegans animal est."

["Man is by nature a clean and delicate creature."--Seneca, Ep., 92.]

Of all the actions of nature, I am the most impatient of being
interrupted in that. I have seen many soldiers troubled with the
unruliness of their bellies; whereas mine and I never fail of our
punctual assignation, which is at leaping out of bed, if some
indispensable business or sickness does not molest us.

I think then, as I said before, that sick men cannot better place
themselves anywhere in more safety, than in sitting still in that course
of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it
will, distempers and puts one out. Do you believe that chestnuts can
hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people?
We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change
that the healthful cannot endure. Prescribe water to a Breton of
threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman
to walk: you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and
light:

"An vivere tanti est?
Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,
Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus. .
Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer
Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis."

["Is life worth so much? We are compelled to withhold the mind
from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we
cease to live . . . . Do I conceive that they still live, to
whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are
governed, is rendered oppressive?"
--Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]

If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare
patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting
off the use of life.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered