one would have me:
for, thanks be to God, we have no traffic together. I am of a quite
contrary humour to other men, for I always despise it; but when I am
sick, instead of recanting, or entering into composition with it, I
begin, moreover, to hate and fear it, telling them who importune me to
take physic, that at all events they must give me time to recover my
strength and health, that I may be the better able to support and
encounter the violence and danger of their potions. I let nature work,
supposing her to be sufficiently armed with teeth and claws to defend
herself from the assaults of infirmity, and to uphold that contexture,
the dissolution of which she flies and abhors. I am afraid, lest,
instead of assisting her when close grappled and struggling with disease,
I should assist her adversary, and burden her still more with work to do.

Now, I say, that not in physic only, but in other more certain arts,
fortune has a very great part.

The poetic raptures, the flights of fancy, that ravish and transport the
author out of himself, why should we not attribute them to his good
fortune, since he himself confesses that they exceed his sufficiency and
force, and acknowledges them to proceed from something else than himself,
and that he has them no more in his power than the orators say they have
those extraordinary motions and agitations that sometimes push them
beyond their design. It is the same in painting, where touches shall
sometimes slip from the hand of the painter, so surpassing both his
conception and his art, as to beget his own admiration and astonishment.
But Fortune does yet more evidently manifest the share she has in all
things of this kind, by the graces and elegances we find in them, not
only beyond the intention, but even without the knowledge of the workman:
a competent reader often discovers in other men's writings other
perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a
richer sense and more quaint expression.

As to military enterprises, every one sees how great a hand Fortune has
in them. Even in our counsels and deliberations there must, certainly,
be something of chance and good-luck mixed with human prudence; for all
that our wisdom can do alone is no great matter; the more piercing,
quick, and apprehensive it is, the weaker it finds itself, and is by so
much more apt to mistrust itself. I am of Sylla's opinion;--["Who freed
his great deeds from envy by ever attribut