t, and hands; and these are oft the seats of very grievous
and lamentable distempers, as gouts, corroding rheums, gangrenes, and
putrid ulcers. And if you apply to yourself the exquisitest of perfumes
or gusts, you will find but some one small part of your body is finely
and delicately touched, while the rest are many times filled with
anguish and complaints. Besides, there is no part of us proof against
fire, sword, teeth, or scourges, or insensible of dolors and aches; yea,
heats, colds, and fevers sink into all our parts alike. But pleasures,
like gales of soft wind, move simpering, one towards one extreme of the
body and another towards another, and then go off in a vapor. Nor are
they of any long durance, but, as so many glancing meteors, they are
no sooner kindled in the body than they are quenched by it. As to pain,
Aeschylus's Philoctetes affords us a sufficient testimony:--

The cruel viper ne'er will quit my foot;
Her dire envenomed teeth have there ta'en root.

For pain will not troll off as pleasure doth, nor imitate it in its
pleasing and tickling touches. But as the clover twists its perplexed
and winding roots into the earth, and through its coarseness abides
there a long time; so pain disperses and entangles its hooks and roots
in the body, and continues there, not for a day or a night, but for
several seasons of years, if not for some revolutions of Olympiads, nor
scarce ever departs unless struck out by other pains, as by stronger
nails. For who ever drank so long as those that are in a fever are
a-dry? Or who was ever so long eating as those that are besieged
suffer hunger? Or where are there any that are so long solaced with the
conversation of friends as tyrants are racking and tormenting? Now all
this is owing to the baseness of the body and its natural incapacity for
a pleasurable life; for it bears pains better than it doth pleasures,
and with respect to those is firm and hardy, but with respect to these
is feeble and soon palled. To which add, that if we are minded to
discourse on a life of pleasure, these men won't give us leave to go on,
but will presently confess themselves that the pleasures of the body are
but short, or rather indeed but of a moment's continuance; if they do
not design to banter us or else speak out of vanity, when Metrodorus
tells us, We many times spit at the pleasures of the body, and Epicurus
saith, A wise man, when he is sick, many times laughs in the very
e