Come into a third place, you shall have an aged father sighing for a
son, a pretty child;

[3916] "Impube pectus quale vel impia
Molliret Thracum pectora."

------"He now lies asleep,
Would make an impious Thracian weep."

Or some fine daughter that died young, _Nondum experta novi gaudia prima
tori_. Or a forlorn son for his deceased father. But why? _Prior exiit,
prior intravit_, he came first, and he must go first. [3917]_Tu frustra
pius, heu_, &c. What, wouldst thou have the laws of nature altered, and him
to live always? Julius Caesar, Augustus, Alcibiades, Galen, Aristotle, lost
their fathers young. And why on the other side shouldst thou so heavily
take the death of thy little son?

[3918] "Num quia nec fato, merita nec morte peribat,
Sed miser ante diem"------

he died before his time, perhaps, not yet come to the solstice of his age,
yet was he not mortal? Hear that divine [3919]Epictetus, "If thou covet thy
wife, friends, children should live always, thou art a fool." He was a fine
child indeed, _dignus Apollineis lachrymis_, a sweet, a loving, a fair, a
witty child, of great hope, another Eteoneus, whom Pindarus the poet and
Aristides the rhetorician so much lament; but who can tell whether he would
have been an honest man? He might have proved a thief, a rogue, a
spendthrift, a disobedient son, vexed and galled thee more than all the
world beside, he might have wrangled with thee and disagreed, or with his
brothers, as Eteocles and Polynices, and broke thy heart; he is now gone to
eternity, as another Ganymede, in the [3920]flower of his youth, "as if he
had risen," saith [3921]Plutarch, "from the midst of a feast" before he was
drunk, "the longer he had lived, the worse he would have been," _et quo
vita longior_, (Ambrose thinks) _culpa numerosior_, more sinful, more to
answer he would have had. If he was naught, thou mayst be glad he is gone;
if good, be glad thou hadst such a son. Or art thou sure he was good? It
may be he was an hypocrite, as many are, and howsoever he spake thee fair,
peradventure he prayed, amongst the rest that Icaro Menippus heard at
Jupiter's whispering place in Lucian, for his father's death, because he
now kept him short, he was to inherit much goods, and many fair manors
after his decease. Or put case he was very good, suppose the best, may not
thy dead son expostulate with thee, as he did in the same [3922]Lucian,
"why dost thou lament my de