series of words, or upon the composing of the countenance. For having the soul contaminated with concupiscence, not touched with repentance, or comforted by any late reconcilation with Almighty God, we go to present him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue, and hope from thence to obtain the remission of our sins. There is nothing so easy, so mild, and so favourable as the divine law; it calls us to it, guilty and abominable as we are; extends its arms, and receives us into its bosom, as foul and polluted as we at present are, and are like to be for the future. But then, in return, we are to look upon it with a respectful eye, we are to receive this pardon with thanksgiving, and, for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to God, to have the soul sorry for its faults, and at variance with those passions, that seduced her to offend him; for neither the gods nor good men (says Plato) will accept the present of a wicked man. Immunis aram si tetigit manus, The pious off'ring of a piece of bread, If on the altar by a pure hand laid, Than costly hecatombs, will better please Th' offended gods, and their just wrath appease. CHAPTER LVII. Of Age. I CANNOT allow of our way of establishing the Age of duration of life. I see that the wise contract it very Cat when much, in comparison of the common opinion. What himself. *Hor. lib. iii. ode 23, ver. 17, &e. man's life. (said the younger Cato to those who would stay his hand from killing himself), am I now of an age to be reproached that I go out of the world too soon?* and yet he was but forty-eight years old. He thought that to be a mature and really an advanced age, conThe natural sidering how few arrive to it: and they who, soothCourse of ing their thoughts with I know not what course, which they call natural, promise themselves some years beyond it, could they be privileged from the fatal accidents, to which every one is by nature exposed, might have some reason so to do. What an idle conceit is it, to expect to die of a mere decay of strength, attending extreme old age, and to propose to ourselves no shorter lease of life than that, considering it as a kind of death of all others the most rare and uncommon? We call this only a natural death, as if it were contrary to nature, to see a man break his neck with a fall, be drowned in shipwreck at sea, or snatched away with a pleurisy, or the plague; and, as if our ordinary condition of life did not expose us to all these inconveniences. Let us no more flatter ourselves with these fine words; we ought rather, at a venture, to call that natural, which is general, common, and universal. To die of old age, thing sin Bary. To die of old age, is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, by so much the less natural than the gular and other deaths, and therefore the less to be hoped for. extraordi- It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; it is a lease which nature grants by particular favour, perhaps, to one only, in the space of two or three ages; discharging him from all the traverses and difficulties she had strewed in the mid-way of this long career. And, therefore, my opinion is, that when once forty years old, we should consider our time of life as an age to which very few arrive for seeing that men do not usually last so long, it is a sign that we are pretty well advanced; and since we have exceeded the bounds, which *Plutarch, in the Life of Cato of Utica, cap. 20. make the common measure of life, we ought not to expect to go much farther. Having escaped so many pits of death, whereinto we have seen so many other men fall, we should acknowledge that so extraordinary a fortune, as that which has hitherto kept us above ground beyond the ordinary term of life, is not likely to continue long. in making life before manage tates. It is a false notion that our very laws are guilty The defect of, which do not allow that a man is capable of the laws, managing his own estate till he be twenty-five years it so late in old, whereas he will have much ado to manage his they admit life so long. Augustus* cut off five years from the men to the ancient Roman standard, and declared, that thirty ment of years was an age sufficient to be a judge. Servius their eTullius excused gentlemen of above forty-seven years of age, from the fatigues of war: Augustus dismissed them at forty-five: though methinks it seems a little unreasonable that men should be sent home to their fire-sides, till fifty-five or sixty years of age. I should be of opinion, that our vocation and employment, should be as far as possible extended for the public good: but I think it a fault on the other hand, that we are not employed soon enough. This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man be thirty before he could be fit to bear the lowest office. years old For my part, I believe our understandings are ripe A man at at twenty, such as they ought to be, and ever will be twenty capable of. A mind that did not by that time give gives proof evident earnest of its force,t never after gave proof of his capa of it. Natural parts and excellences produce what they have of vigorous and fine by that term or never. They say in Dauphiny: *Suetonius, in the Life of Augustus, sect. 32. It is observable, says Philip de Comines, that all men whoever became great or performed great actions, began very young, and this is owing to education, or else the grace of God, lib. i. cap. 10, at the end. city. What age of the finest actions, Se l'espino non picquo quan nai, A peno que piquo giamai. "If the thorn does not prick then, it will scarce ever prick." Of all the great actions of man I ever heard or is capable read of, of what sort soever, I have observed, both in former ages and our own, more performed before the age of thirty than after; and often too in the lives of the very same men. May I not safely instance in those of Hannibal, and his great adversary Scipio? The better half of their lives, they lived upon the glory they had acquired in their youth; they were great men after, it is true, in comparison of others; but by no means, in comparison of themselves. As to my own part, I do certainly believe, that, since that age, both my understanding and my constitution have rather decayed than improved, and declined rather than advanced. It is possible, that with those who make the best use of their time, knowledge and experience may increase with their years; but the vivacity, quickness, and steadiness, and other parts of us, of much greater importance, and much more essentially our own, languish and decay: Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus ævi, Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes 11 *Lucret. lib. iii. ver. 452. but that they set us at work too late. For the frailty of life considered, and to how many common and natural shocks it is exposed, methinks we should not spend so great a part of it in squabbles about birthright, in idleness, and in education. CHAPTER LVIII. Of the Inconstancy of our Actions, THEY who apply themselves to the critical inspection of human actions, are in nothing so much perplexed as how to reconcile them, and set them off with equal lustre; for in general these so strange contradict one another, that it seems impossible they should proceed from one and the same person. We find the younger Marius one while a son of Mars, and another the son of Venus. Pope Boniface VIII. is said to have entered on the papacy like a fox, to have behaved in it like a lion, and to have died like a dog. And who could believe it to be the same Nero, that perfect image of cruelty, who, when the sentence passed upon a criminal was brought to him in form to sign it, cried out, " Would to God I had "never been taught to write !" * So much it went to his heart to condemn a man to death. All history is so full of the like instances, nay, every man is able to furnish himself with so many out of his own practice, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give themselves the trouble of reconciling such inconsistencies, considering that irresolution seems to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our nature; witness the famous verse of Publius the mimic: * Vellem nescire literas. Senec. de Clementia, lib. ii. cap. 1. |