‘Then he knew what he was about.’
‘As well probably as any man of his profession at the time.’
‘He recommends drowning,’ said Charley, without raising his eyes from the book.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean for suicide.’
‘Nonsense, He was the last man to favour that. You must make a mistake. He was a thoroughly Christian man.’
‘I know nothing about that. Hear this.’
He read the following passages from the beginning of the thirteenth section of the second part.
‘With what shifts and pains we come into the world, we remember not; but ‘tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but fewer hours have been spent to soften that necessity.’—‘Ovid, the old heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an easier way of death; wherein the water, entering the possessions of air, makes a temporary suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof.’—‘Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point but the pummel of his sword.’
‘Poison. I suppose,’ he said, as he ended the extract.