UNIVERSALITY OF THE MAXIM, "LAVORA COME SE TU," ETC.
(Vol. iii., p. 188.)
I have not been able to trace this sentence to its source, but it would most probably be found in that admirable book, Monosinii Floris Italicæ Linguæ, 4to, Venet., 1604; or in Torriano's Dictionary of Italian Proverbs and Phrases, folio, Lond., 1666, a book of which Duplessis doubts the existence! Most of Jeremy Taylor's citations from the Italian are proverbial phrases. Your correspondent has probably copied the phrase as it stands in Bohn's edition of the Holy Living and Dying, but there is a trifling variation as it stands in the first edition of Holy Living, 1650:—
"Lavora come se tu havesti a campar ogni hora:
Adora come se tu havesti a morir alhora."
The universality of this maxim, in ages and countries remote from each other, is remarkable. Thus we find it in the Hitopadésa:
"A wise man should think upon knowledge and wealth as if he were undecaying and immortal. He should practise duty as if he were seized by the hair of his head by Death."—Johnson's Translation, Intr. S.
So Democratis of Abdera, more sententiously:
"Οὕτος πειρῶ ζῆν, ὡς καὶ ὀλίγον καὶ πολὺν χρόνον βιωσόμενος."
Then descending to the fifteenth century, we
have it thus in the racy old Saxon Laine Doctrinal:
"Men schal leven, unde darumme sorgen,
Alse men Stärven sholde morgen,
Unde leren êrnst liken,
Alse men leven sholde ewigliken."
Where the author of the Voyage autour de ma Chambre, Jean Xavier Maitre, stumbled upon it, or whether it was a spontaneous thought, does not appear; but in his pleasing little book, Lettres sur la Vieillesse, we have it thus verbatim:
"Il faut vivre comme si l'on avoit à mourir demain, mais s'arranger en même temps sa vie, autant que cet arrangement peut dépendre de notre prévoyance, comme si l'on avoit devant soi quelques siècles, et même une éternité d'existence."
Some of your correspondents may possibly be able to indicate other repetitions of this truly "golden sentence," which cannot be too often repeated, for we all know that
"A verse may reach him who a sermon flies."
S. W. Singer.