rs, save eighteen, that this trial has lasted, for the first
of them was born in the year 1402: 'tis now, indeed, very good reason
that this experience should begin to fail us. Let them not, therefore,
reproach me with the infirmities under which I now suffer; is it not
enough that I for my part have lived seven-and-forty years in good
health? though it should be the end of my career; 'tis of the longer
sort.

My ancestors had an aversion to physic by some occult and natural
instinct; for the very sight of drugs was loathsome to my father. The
Seigneur de Gaviac, my uncle by the father's side, a churchman, and a
valetudinary from his birth, and yet who made that crazy life hold out to
sixty-seven years, being once fallen into a furious fever, it was ordered
by the physicians he should be plainly told that if he would not make use
of help (for so they call that which is very often an obstacle), he would
infallibly be a dead man. That good man, though terrified with this
dreadful sentence, yet replied, "I am then a dead man." But God soon
after made the prognostic false. The last of the brothers--there were
four of them--and by many years the last, the Sieur de Bussaguet, was the
only one of the family who made use of medicine, by reason, I suppose, of
the concern he had with the other arts, for he was a councillor in the
court of Parliament, and it succeeded so ill with him, that being in
outward appearance of the strongest constitution, he yet died long before
any of the rest, save the Sieur de Saint Michel.

'Tis possible I may have derived this natural antipathy to physic from
them; but had there been no other consideration in the case, I would have
endeavoured to have overcome it; for all these conditions that spring in
us without reason, are vicious; 'tis a kind of disease that we should
wrestle with. It may be I had naturally this propension; but I have
supported and fortified it by arguments and reasons which have
established in me the opinion I am of. For I also hate the consideration
of refusing physic for the nauseous taste.

I should hardly be of that humour who hold health to be worth purchasing
by all the most painful cauteries and incisions that can be applied.
And, with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided, if
greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted, that will
terminate in greater pleasures. Health is a precious thing, and the only
one, in truth, meriting that a