All the time you live, you steale it from death: it is at her charge. The continuall worke of your life, is to contrive death: you are in death, during the time you continue in life: for, you are after death, when you are no longer living. Or if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life: but during life, you are still dying: and death doth more rudely touch the dying than the dead, and more lively and essentially. If you have profited by life, you have also beene fed thereby, depart then satisfied.
Cur non ut plenus vitae conviva recedis?
[Footnote: Lucret. 1. iii. 982.]
Why like a full-fed guest,
Depart you not to rest?
If you have not knowne how to make use of it: if it were unprofitable to you, what need you care to have lost it to what end would you enjoy it longer?
—cur amplius addere quaeris Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne? [Footnote: Lucret. 1. iii. 989.]
Why seeke you more to gaine, what must againe
All perish ill, and passe with griefe or paine?
Life in itselfe is neither good nor evill: it is the place of good or evill, according as you prepare it for them. And if you have lived one day, you have seene all: one day is equal to all other daies. There is no other light, there is no other night. This Sunne, this Moone, these Starres, and this disposition, is the very same which your forefathers enjoyed, and which shall also entertaine your posteritie.
Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes
Aspicient.
[Footnote: Manil. i. 523.]
No other saw our Sires of old,
No other shall their sonnes behold.
And if the worst happen, the distribution and varietie of all the acts of my comedie, is performed in one yeare. If you have observed the course of my foure seasons; they containe the infancie, the youth, the viriltie, and the old age of the world. He hath plaied his part: he knowes no other wilinesse belonging to it, but to begin againe, it will ever be the same, and no other.