armies, a miserable
suppliant to the rascally officers of a king of Egypt. So much the
prolongation of five or six months of life cost the great and noble
Pompey, and no longer since than our fathers' days, Ludovico Sforza,
the tenth duke of Milan, whom all Italy had so long truckled under,
was seen to die a wretched prisoner at Loches, but not till he had
lived ten years in captivity, which was the worst part of his fortune.
The fairest of all queens (Mary, Queen of Scots), widow to the
greatest king in Europe,[24] did she not come to die by the hand of an
executioner? Unworthy and barbarous cruelty! and a thousand more
examples there are of the same kind; for it seems that as storms and
tempests have a malice to the proud and overtow'ring heights of our
lofty buildings, there are also spirits above that are envious of the
grandeurs here below.

[Footnote 24: Francis II of France, to whom she was married in 1558
and who died two years afterward.]

_Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
Obterit, et pulchros fasces, saevasque secures
Proculcare ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur._

--_Lucret._, l. 5.

And it should seem also that Fortune sometimes lies in wait to
surprize the last hour of our lives, to show the power she has in a
moment to overthrow what she was so many years in building, making us
cry out with Laborius, "_Nimirum hac die una plus vixi mihi quam
vivendum fuit._"--Macrob., l. 2., c. 2. "I have liv'd longer by this
one day than I ought to have done." And in this sense, this good
advice of Solon may reasonably be taken; but he being a philosopher,
with which sort of men the favors and disgraces of fortune stand for
nothing, either to the making a man happy or unhappy, and with whom
grandeurs and powers, accidents of quality, are upon the matter
indifferent: I am apt to think that he had some further aim, and that
his meaning was that the very felicity of life itself, which depends
upon the tranquillity and contentment of a well-descended spirit, and
the resolution and assurance of a well-order'd soul, ought never to be
attributed to any man, till he has first been seen to play the last,
and doubtless the hardest act of his part, because there may be
disguise and dissimulation in all the rest, where these fine
philosophical discourses are only put on; and where accidents do not
touch us to the quick, they give us leisure to maintain the same sober
gravity; but in this last scene of death,