obscure and variable, and prudent livers may well ask why for the
obscure and variable objects of life they should lose life
itself--"Propter causas vivendi perdere vitam," if we may reverse the
old quotation.

So they are quite justified in eating the bread of carefulness, and no
one who has known danger will condemn their solicitude for safely. But
yet, in hearing of those devices, or perusing the _Sour Milk Gazette_
and the _Valetudinarian's Handbook_, somehow there come to my mind the
words, "Insanitas Sanitutum, omnia Insanitas!" And suddenly the picture
of those woeful islanders whom Gulliver discovered rises before me. For,
as we remember, in the realm of Laputa, he found a certain number of
both sexes (about eleven hundred) who were called Struldbrugs, or
Immortals, because, being born with a certain spot over the left
eyebrow, they were destined never to know the common visitation of
death. We remember how Gulliver envied them, accounting them the
happiest of human beings, since they had obtained in perpetuity the
blessing of life, for which all men struggle so hard that whoever has
one foot in the grave is sure to hold back the other as strongly as he
can. But in the end, he concluded that their lot was not really
enviable, seeing that increasing years only brought an increase of their
dullness and incapacity:

"They were not only opinionative," he writes, "peevish,
covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship,
and dead to all natural affections, which never descended below
their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their
prevailing passions. But those objects against which their
envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger
sort, and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former
they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure;
and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that
others have gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves
never can hope to arrive."

The explorer further discovered that, after the age of eighty, the
marriages of the Struldbrugs were dissolved, because the law thought it
a reasonable indulgence that those who were condemned, without any fault
of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have
their misery doubled by the load of a wife; also that they could never
amuse themselves with reading, because their memory would not serve to
carry them from the beginning of