thought he had got a prize by stealing several pieces from me, wherewith
he was best pleased; but it is my comfort that he will be no greater a
gainer than I shall be a loser by the theft. I am grown older by seven
or eight years since I began; nor has it been without same new
acquisition: I have, in that time, by the liberality of years, been
acquainted with the stone: their commerce and long converse do not well
pass away without some such inconvenience. I could have been glad that
of other infirmities age has to present long-lived men withal, it had
chosen some one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not
possibly have laid upon me a disease for which, even from my infancy, I
have had so great a horror; and it is, in truth, of all the accidents of
old age, that of which I have ever been most afraid. I have often
thought with myself that I went on too far, and that in so long a voyage
I should at last run myself into some disadvantage; I perceived, and have
often enough declared, that it was time to depart, and that life should
be cut off in the sound and living part, according to the surgeon's rule
in amputations; and that nature made him pay very strict usury who did
not in due time pay the principal. And yet I was so far from being
ready, that in the eighteen months' time or thereabout that I have been
in this uneasy condition, I have so inured myself to it as to be content
to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope:
so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no
condition so wretched they will not accept, provided they may live! Hear
Maecenas:

"Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa,
Lubricos quate dentes;
Vita dum superest, bene est."

["Cripple my hand, foot, hip; shake out my loose teeth: while
there's life, 'tis well."--Apud Seneca, Ep., 101.]

And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty
he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he could hear of to death, to
deliver them, as he pretended, from the painful life they lived. For
there was not one of them who would not rather have been thrice a leper
than be not. And Antisthenes the Stoic, being very sick, and crying out,
"Who will deliver me from these evils?" Diogenes, who had come to visit
him, "This," said he, presenting him a knife, "soon enough,