habits of a lifetime. In diet he
abstained from flesh and abhorred wine. His habitual weaknesses were
those of one who subdues the body to mental government. As costive as
Scaliger,[127] Sarpi suffered from hepatic hemorrhage, retention of
urine, prolapsus recti, and hemorrhoids. Intermittent fevers reduced his
strength, but rarely interfered with his activity. He refused to treat
himself as an invalid, never altered his course of life for any illness,
and went about his daily avocations when men of laxer tissue would have
taken to their bed. His indifference to danger was that of the Stoic or
the Mussulman. During a period of fifteen years he knew that restless
foes were continually lying in wait to compass his death by poison or
the dagger. Yet he could hardly be persuaded to use the most ordinary
precautions. 'I am resolved,' he wrote, in 1609, 'to give no thought
whatever to these wretchednesses. He who thinks too much of living knows
not how to live well. One is bound to die once; to be curious about the
day or place or manner of dying is unprofitable. Whatsoever is God's
will is good.'[128] As fear had no hold upon his nature, so was he
wholly free from the dominion of the senses. A woman's name, if we
except that of the Queen of France, is, I think, not once mentioned in
his correspondence. Even natural affections seem to have been
obliterated; for he records nothing of his mother or his father or a
sister who survived their deaths. One suit of clothes sufficed him; and
his cell was furnished with three hour-glasses, a picture of Christ in
the Garden, and a crucifix raised above a human skull.

[Footnote 127: We may remind our readers of Henri IV.'s parting words to
Joseph Scaliger: 'Est-il vrai que vous avez ete de Paris a Dijon sans
aller a la selle?']

[Footnote 128: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 239.]

His physical sensitiveness, developed by austerity of life, was of the
highest acuteness. Sight, touch, and taste in him acquired the most
exquisite delicacy. He was wont to say that he feared no poison in his
food, since he could discriminate the least adulteration of natural
flavors. His mental perspicacity was equally subtle. As a boy he could
recite thirty lines of Virgil after hearing them read over once. Books
were not so much perused by him as penetrated at a glance; and what he
had but casually noticed, never afterwards escaped his memory. In the
vast Venetian archives he could lay his hand on any document wi