for age doth but increase fittest to die; yet if (as divinity affirms) there shall be no gray hairs in heaven, but all shall rise in the perfect state of men, we do but outlive those perfections in this world, to be recalled unto them by a greater miracle in the next, and run on here but to be retrograde hereafter. Were there any hopes to outlive vice, or a point to be superannuated from sin, it were worthy our knees to implore the days of Methuselah. But age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions our vices. into worser habits, and (like diseases) brings on incurable vices; for every day as we grow weaker in age, we grow stronger in sin: and the number of our days doth but make our sins innumerable. The same vice committed at sixteen, is not the same, though it agrees in all other circumstances, as at forty, but swells and doubles from the circumstance of our ages; wherein, besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of our judgement cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon: every sin the oftener it is committed, the more it acquireth in the quality of evil; as it succeeds in time, so it proceeds in degrees of badness; for as they proceed they ever multiply, and, like figures in arithmetic, the last stands for more than all that went before it. And though I think that no man can live well once but he that could live twice, yet for my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my days: not upon Cicero's ground, because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse. I find my growing judgment daily instruct me how to be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity makes me daily do worse I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then, because I was a child; and because I commit them still, I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child, before the days of dotage; and stand in need of Eson's bath before threescore. providence XLIII. And truly there goes a great deal A special of providence to produce a man's life unto preserves threescore there is more required than an our lives. able temper for those years; though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for seventy, yet I perceive in some it gives no light past thirty men assign not all the causes of long life that write whole books thereof. They : * I suppose he alludes to an expression in an Epistle of Cicero, written in his exile, to his wife and children, where he hath these words to his wife: Quod reliquum est, te sustenta, mea Terentia, ut potes; honestissime viximus, floruimus. Non vitium nostrum sed virtus nostra nos afflixit: peccatum est nullum, nisi quod non unà animam cum ornamentis amisimus. L. xiii. Ep. 55. Cf. Cic. De Senectute, xxiii. † Ovid, Met. vii. 176. 4. other world, the truest microcosm, the womb of our mother; for besides that general and common existence we are conceived to hold in our chaos, and whilst we sleep within the bosom of our causes, we enjoy a being and life in three distinct worlds, wherein we receive most manifest graduations. In that obscure world, and womb of our mother, our time is short, computed by the moon, yet longer than the days of many creatures that behold the sun; ourselves being not yet without life, sense, and reason; though for the manifestation of its actions, it awaits the opportunity of objects, and seems to live there but in its root and soul of vegetation. Entering afterwards upon the scene of the world, we rise up and become another creature, performing the reasonable actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of divinity in us; but not in complement and perfection, till we have once more cast our secondine, that is, this slough of flesh, and are delivered into the last 2 Cor. xii. world, that is, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper ubi of spirits. The smattering I have of the philosopher's stone (which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great deal of divinity, and instructed my belief, how that immortal spirit and incorruptible substance of my soul may lie obscure, and sleep a while within this house of flesh. Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in silkworms, turned my philosophy into divinity. There is in these works of nature, which seem to puzzle reason, something divine, and hath more in it than the eye of a common spectator doth discover. ashamed of XL. I am naturally bashful; nor hath con- Death to be versation, age, or travel been able to effront rather than or enharden me; yet I have one part of mod- feared. esty which I have seldom discovered in another, that is, (to speak truly,) I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof: 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us, that our nearest friends, wife, and children, stand afraid and start at us. The birds and beasts of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting all allegiance, begin to prey upon us. This very conceit hath in a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed up in the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied, without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and none had said, Quantum mutatus ab illo! Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life for contracting any shame * Compare Wordsworth's Ode, "Intimations of Immortality," especially stanza v. Posthumous fame desired. ful disease upon me, whereby I might not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any. XLI. Some, upon the courage of a fruitful not to be issue, wherein, as in the truest chronicle, they seem to outlive themselves, can with greater patience away with death. This conceit and counterfeit subsisting in our progenies seems to me a mere fallacy, unworthy the desires of a man that can but conceive a thought of the next world; who, in a nobler ambition, should desire to live in his substance in heaven, rather than his name and shadow in the earth. therefore at my death I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history, or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found anywhere, but in the universal register of God. I am not yet so cynical as to approve the testament of Diogenes; nor do altogether follow that rodomontado of Lucan: - Cœlo tegitur, qui non habet urnam. And Phars. vii. 819. He that unburied lies wants not his herse, but commend, in my calmer judgment, those *Who willed his friend not to bury him, but hang him up with a staff in his hand to fright away the crows. |