outlive themselves, can with greater patience away with death. This conceit and counterfeit subsisting in our progenies, seems to be 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. And 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 memory of my name() to befound anywhere, but in the universal register of God. I am not yet so cynical, as to approve the testament (95) of Diogenes, nor do I altogether allow that rhodomontade of Lucan;

Cœlo tegitur, qui non habet urnam.

He that unburied lies wants not his hearse,
For unto him a tomb's the universe;

but commend, in my calmer judgment, those ingenuous intentions that desire to sleep by the urns of their fathers, and strive to go the nearest way

(94) Upon this it will suffice to recall the remark of that ancient author, who said he had always noticed that philosophers put their names to the works which they wrote on the contempt of fame; which was the case also with Sir Thomas Browne. Apart from affectation, the confession of our great contemporary poet might be made by every man who meddles with composi

tion:

"I too would be remembered in my line,
With my land's language."

ED.

(95) Who willed his friend not to bury him, but hang him up with a staff in his hand, to fright away the crows.

unto corruption. I do not envy the temper of crows and daws, nor the numerous and weary days of our fathers before the flood. If there be any truth in astrology, I may outlive a jubilee. As yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years ;(9) and yet, excepting one, have seen the ashes, and left under-ground, all the kings of Europe; have been contemporary to three emperors, four grand signors, and as many popes. Methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun; I have shaken hands with delight. In my warm blood and canicular days, I perceive I do anticipate the vices of age; the world to me is but a dream or mock show, and we all therein but pantaloons and antics, to my severer contemplations. (97)

It is not, I confess, an unlawful prayer to desire to surpass the days of our Saviour, or wish to outlive that age wherein he thought fittest to die; yet if (as divinity affirms) there shall be no grey hairs in heaven, but all shall rise in the perfect state of

(96) That is, he was not thirty years old when the first rough draught of this work was thrown upon paper; but he had advanced considerably beyond that age, I believe, before it saw the light.-ED.

(97) In the mouth of Diogenes, ensconsed in his tub, this would not have sounded amiss; but, though the author professes to have grown old before his time, it excites a smile to hear a young physician under thirty boasting of having "shaken hands with delight," and of the world's being “but a dream, or mock show," to his "severer judgment." He lived, we know, to be on better terms with the world, to taste of much delight, and to discover that, among mankind, there are some who should not be esteemed mere pantaloons.-ED.

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 into worser habits, and (like diseases) bringing 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 that circumstance of our ages, wherein, besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of our judgment 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 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.

G

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 son's bath before threescore.

And truly there goes a great deal of providence to produce a man's life unto threescore; there is more required than an 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. (99) They

(98) Perhaps not; yet in Lord Bacon's "History of Life and Death," the reader will find a tolerably long list of causes, together with numerous examples of men who have attained to a very great old age. An instance has just occurred in Scotland, where a poor man, by name John Gordon, died in the beginning of this winter at the age of one hundred and thirty-two, having, up to the last year of his life, been able to work in the garden, while his sons and grandson, who dwelt with him, had been reduced to stocking-knitting, and other in-door occupations. In England itself we have had extraordinary instances of longevity; Henry Jenkins, a Welshman lived to the age of one hundred and sixty-nine; and it is clear to me that old Parr, who died at the age of one hundred and fifty-two, would have lived much longer, had he not been brought to London, and induced to change his manner of life. See the account of his circumstances and death in Harvey's works. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a May game, or Morris-dance, was performed, at some village in Herefordshire, by eight men, whose united ages amounted to eight hundred years, though among them some were more than a hundred and others less. Northern countries have generally been supposed most favourable to long life, though among the Yoghis of Hindustan many attain an age

that found themselves on the radical balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is therefore a secret glome or bottom of our days; it was His wisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accomplishes them; wherein the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of God in a secret and disputed way do execute his will. Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that die about thirty: they fall but like the whole world, whose solid and wellcomposed substance must not expect the duration and period of its constitution: when all things are completed in it, its age is accomplished; and the last and general fever may as naturally destroy it before six thousand, as me before forty. There is therefore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature: we are not only ignorant in antipathies and occult qualities; our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our days

not exceeded by any Hyperborean whatever. Instances have there been said to occur of men two hundred years old. Aristotle, to whom similar facts were probably known, concluded accordingly, that southern countries enjoyed in this respect the advantage; and the example of the Ethiopians has been adduced by other writers. Upon the whole, however, the greater number of testimonies are in favour of the north. This was the opinion of Hippocrates (De Aëre et Locis, &c. §. 19.); and his able and learned commentator, Coray, brings forward numerous facts in support of the Coan's views. (tom. II. p. 56. ff.) Buffon speaks of a Swede who lived to be one hundred and sixtyone; (Hist. Nat. III. 443.) and Peter Czartin, the Hungarian, towards the close of the eighteenth century, reached the truly patriarchal age of one hundred and eighty-five. (Com. de Reb. in Scient. Nat. et Med. Gestis. V. 147.)—ED.