not of retracted looks, but who carry their hearts in their faces, and need not to be looked upon with perspectives; not sordidly or mischievously ingrateful; who cannot learn to ride upon the neck of the afflicted, nor load the heavy laden, but who keep the temple of Janus shut by peaceable and quiet tempers; who make not only the best friends, but the best enemies, as easier to forgive than offend, and ready to pass by the second offence before they avenge the first; who make natural royalists, obedient subjects, kind and merciful princes, verified in our own, one of the best-natured kings of this throne. Of the old Roman emperours the best were the best natured; though they made but a small number, and might be writ in a ring. Many of the rest were as bad men as princes; humourists rather than of good humours; and of good natural parts rather than of good natures; which did but arm their bad inclinations, and make them wittily wicked.

XIII. With what shift and pains we come into the world, we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but fewer

hours have been spent to soften that necessity.

That the smoothest way unto the grave is made by bleeding, as common opinion presumeth, beside the sick and fainting languors, which accompany that effusion, the experiment in Lucan and Seneca will make us doubt; under which the noble stoick so deeply laboured, that to conceal his affliction he was fain to retire from the sight of his wife, and not ashamed to implore the merciful hand of his physician to shorten his misery therein. Ovid,* the old heroes, and the stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an easier way of death; wherein the water, entering the possessions of air, makes a temperate suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof. 'Twas a dull way practised by Themistoclest to overwhelm himself with bullsblood, who, being an Athenian, might have held an easier theory of death from the state-potion of

* Demito naufragium, mors mihi munus erit. † Plutarch.

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his country; from which Socrates in Plato seemed not to suffer much more than from the fit of an ague. Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery not in the point, but the pummel of his sword.*

The Egyptians were merciful contrivers, who destroyed their malefactors by asps, charming their senses into an invincible sleep, and killing as it were with Hermes his rod. The Turkish emperourt odious for other cruelty, was herein a remarkable master of mercy, killing his favourite in his sleep, and sending him from the shade into the house of darkness. He who had been thus destroyed would hardly have bled at the presence of his destroyer; when men are already dead by metaphor, and pass but from one sleep unto another, wanting herein the eminent part of severity, to feel themselves to die, and escaping the sharpest attendant of death, the lively apprehension thereof.

* Pummel, wherein he is said to have carried something whereby upon a struggle or despair he might deliver himself from all misfortunes.

+ Solyman.-Turkish History.

But to learn to die, is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to untie or cut the most gordian knots of life, and make men's miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil spirits, as undying substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and therefore they everlastingly struggle under their angustias, and bound up with immortality can never get out of themselves.

THE THIRD PART.

I. 'Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what century to propose for example. Some have been far more approvable than others; but virtue and vice, panegyricks and satires, scatteringly to be found in all. History sets down not only things laudable, but abominable; things which should never have been or never have been known; so that noble patterns must be fetcht here and there from single persons rather than whole nations, and from all nations rather than any one. The world was early bad, and the first sin the most deplorable of any. The younger world afforded the oldest men, and perhaps the best and the worst, when length of days made virtuous habits heroical and immovable, vicious, inveterate and irreclaimable. And since 'tis said that the imaginations of their hearts were evil, only evil, and continually evil, it may be feared that their sins held pace with their lives; and their longevity swelling their impieties,