is life, never man so uncertain as to its duration.
Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and
vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness
contract my hopes. Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it
eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done
to-day. Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our
end; and if we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our
heads, besides the accident that immediately threatens us, we shall find
that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that
sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle
at home, are the one as near it as the other.

"Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior."

["No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than
another of to-morrow."--Seneca, Ep., 91.]

For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear
too short, were it but an hour's business I had to do.

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a
memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I
told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a
league's distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when
that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there,
because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am
eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own
particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like
to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with
him I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can,
be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care,
at that time, to have no business with any one but one's self:--

"Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo
Multa?"

["Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?"
--Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition.
One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a
glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his
daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he
must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son,
as the principal c