upportable? the
ordinary offices of fife do not go that length. You teach your best
friends to be cruel perforce; hardening wife and children by long use
neither to regard nor to lament your sufferings. The groans of the stone
are grown so familiar to my people, that nobody takes any notice of them.
And though we should extract some pleasure from their conversation (which
does not always happen, by reason of the disparity of conditions, which
easily begets contempt or envy toward any one whatever), is it not too
much to make abuse of this half a lifetime? The more I should see them
constrain themselves out of affection to be serviceable to me, the more I
should be sorry for their pains. We have liberty to lean, but not to lay
our whole weight upon others, so as to prop ourselves by their ruin; like
him who caused little children's throats to be cut to make use of their
blood for the cure of a disease he had, or that other, who was
continually supplied with tender young girls to keep his old limbs warm
in the night, and to mix the sweetness of their breath with his, sour and
stinking. I should readily advise Venice as a retreat in this decline of
life. Decrepitude is a solitary quality. I am sociable even to excess,
yet I think it reasonable that I should now withdraw my troubles from the
sight of the world and keep them to myself. Let me shrink and draw up
myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without
hanging upon them. I should endanger them in so slippery a passage: 'tis
time to turn my back to company.

"But, in these travels, you will be taken ill in some wretched place,
where nothing can be had to relieve you." I always carry most things
necessary about me; and besides, we cannot evade Fortune if she once
resolves to attack us. I need nothing extraordinary when I am sick.
I will not be beholden to my bolus to do that for me which nature cannot.
At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down,
whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile
myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by
so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much
the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or
counsellor than of a physician. What I have not settled of my affairs
when I was in health, let no one expect I should do it when I am sick.
What I will do for the service of death is always don