tion of Life should be only a secondary
Concern, and the Direction of it our Principal. If we have this Frame of
Mind, we shall take the best Means to preserve Life, without being
over-sollicitous about the Event; and shall arrive at that Point of
Felicity which _Martial_ has mentioned as the Perfection of Happiness,
of neither fearing nor wishing for Death.

In answer to the Gentleman, who tempers his Health by Ounces and by
Scruples, and instead of complying with those natural Sollicitations of
Hunger and Thirst, Drowsiness or Love of Exercise, governs himself by
the Prescriptions of his Chair, I shall tell him a short Fable.

_Jupiter_, says the Mythologist, to reward the Piety of a certain
Country-man, promised to give him whatever he would ask. The Country-man
desired that he might have the Management of the Weather in his own
Estate: He obtained his Request, and immediately distributed Rain, Snow,
and Sunshine, among his several Fields, as he thought the Nature of the
Soil required. At the end of the Year, when he expected to see a more
than ordinary Crop, his Harvest fell infinitely short of that of his
Neighbours: Upon which (says the fable) he desired _Jupiter_ to take the
Weather again into his own Hands, or that otherwise he should utterly
ruin himself.

C.

[Footnote 1: Dr. Thomas Sydenham died in 1689, aged 65. He was the
friend of Boyle and Locke, and has sometimes been called the English
Hippocrates; though brethren of an older school endeavoured, but in
vain, to banish him as a heretic out of the College of Physicians. His
'Methodus Curandi Febres' was first published in 1666.]

[Footnote 2: Sanctorius, a Professor of Medicine at Padua, who died in
1636, aged 75, was the first to discover the insensible perspiration,
and he discriminated the amount of loss by it in experiments upon
himself by means of his Statical Chair. His observations were published
at Venice in 1614, in his 'Ars de Static Medicind', and led to the
increased use of Sudorifics. A translation of Sanctorius by Dr. John
Quincy appeared in 1712, the year after the publication of this essay.
The 'Art of Static Medicine' was also translated into French by M. Le
Breton, in 1722. Dr. John Quincy became well known as the author of a
'Complete Dispensatory' (1719, &c.).]

[Footnote 3: an half]

[Footnote 4: The old English reading is:

'I was well; I would be better; and here I am.']

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