the adversary of pleasure. Nature is a gentle guide, but not more
sweet and gentle, than prudent and just: "Intrandum est in rerum
naturam, et penitus, quid ea postulet, pervidendum." I hunt after
her foot throughout; we have confounded it with artificial traces; and
that academic and peripatetic good, which is, "to live according to
it," becomes, by this means, hard to limit and explain; and that of
the Stoics, cousin-german to it, which is "to consent to nature." Is
it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are
necessary? And yet they will not beat it out of my head, that it is
not a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which,
says an ancient, the gods always conspire. To what end do we dismember
by divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a
correspondence? Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices;
let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body
stay and fix the levity of the soul. "Qui, velut summum bonum,
laudat animoe naturam, et, tanquam malum, naturam carnis accusat,
profecto et animam carnaliter appetit, et carnem carnaliter fugit;
quoniam id vanitate sentit humana, non veritate divina." In this
present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we
stand accountable, even to a hair and 'tis no slight commission to
man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain,
and the principal injunction of all, and the Creator has seriously and
strictly enjoined it. Authority has alone power to work upon common
understandings, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore
let us again charge with it in this place: "Stultitiae proprium quis
non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter facere, quae facienda sunt; et
alio corpus impellere, alio animum; distrahique inter diversissimos
motus?" To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what
whimsies and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of
which he diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the
time he spends in eating: you will find there is nothing so insipid in
all the dishes at your table, as this wise meditation of his (for
the most part we had better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake);
and that his discourses and notions are not worth the worst mess
there. Though they were the ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what
then? I do not here speak of, nor mix with the rabble of us ordinary
men, and the vanity of the thoughts and desires that divert us,
those venerable souls, elevated by the ardor of devotion and religion,
to a constant and conscientious meditation of divine things, who, by
the energy of vivid and vehement hope, prepossessing the use of the
eternal nourishment, the final aim and last step of Christian desires,
the sole, constant, and incorruptible pleasure, disdain to apply
themselves to our necessitous, fluid and ambiguous conveniences, and
easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual and temporal
pasture: 'tis a privileged study. Between ourselves, I have ever
observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of
singular accord.

    Aesop, that great man, saw his master make water as he walked:
"What, then," said he, "must we dung as we run?" Let us manage our
time as well as we can, there will yet remain a great deal that will
be idle and ill employed. The mind has not other hours enough
wherein to do its business, without disassociating itself from the
body, in that little space it must have for its necessity. They
would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men;
'tis folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they
transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay
themselves lower. These transcendental humors affright me, like high
and inaccessible cliffs and precipices; and nothing is hard for me
to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstacies and
communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which
they say he was called divine; and of our sciences, those seem to be
the most terrestrial and low that are highest mounted; and I find
nothing so humble and mortal in the life of Alexander, as his
fancies about his immortalization. Philotas pleasantly quipped him
in his answer: he congratulated him by letter concerning the oracle of
Jupiter Hammon, which had placed him among the gods: "Upon thy
account, I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live
with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the
measure of a man." "Diis te minorem quod geris, imperas." The pretty
inscription wherewith the Athenians honored the entry of Pompey into
their city, is conformable to my sense: "By so much thou art a god, as
thou confessest thee a man." 'Tis an absolute and, as it were, a
divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being.
We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of
our own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to
reside. 'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts,
we must yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated
throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech. The fairest
lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves
to the common and human model; without miracle, without
extravagance. Old age stands a little in need of a more gentle
treatment. Let us recommend it to God, the protector of health and
wisdom, but withal, let it be gay and sociable.

                  "Frui paratis et valido mihi

                   Latoe, dones, et, precor, integra

                 Cum mente; nec turpem senectam

                   Degere, nec Cithara carentem."

                            THE END
.