SECT. 13
With what shift 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. That the smoothest way unto the grave is made by bleeding, as common opinion presumeth, beside the sick and fainting Languors which accompany that effusion, the experiment in Lucan and Seneca will make us doubt; under which the noble Stoick so deeply laboured, that, to conceal his affliction, he was fain to retire from the sight of his Wife, and not ashamed to implore the merciful hand of his Physician to shorten his misery therein. Ovid,[349] 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, entring the possessions of Air, makes a temperate 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. 'Twas a dull way practised by Themistocles,[350] to overwhelm himself with Bulls-blood, who, being an Athenian, might have held an easier Theory of Death from the state potion of his Country; from which Socrates in Plato seemed not to suffer much more than from the fit of an Ague. Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poyniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point but the pummel[351] of his Sword.
The Egyptians were merciful contrivers, who destroyed their malefactors by Asps, charming their senses into an invincible sleep, and killing as it were with Hermes his Rod. The Turkish Emperour,[352] odious for other Cruelty, was herein a remarkable Master of Mercy, killing his Favorite in his sleep, and sending him from the shade into the house of darkness. He who had been thus destroyed would hardly have bled at the presence of his destroyer; when Men are already dead by metaphor, and pass but from one sleep unto another, wanting herein the eminent part of severity, to feel themselves to dye, and escaping the sharpest attendant of Death, the lively apprehension thereof. But to learn to dye is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to unty or cut the most Gordian Knots of Life, and make men’s miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil Spirits, as undying Substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and therefore they everlastingly struggle under their Angustia’s, and bound up with immortality can never get out of themselves.
Footnotes
[339] Cerebrum Jovis, for a delicious bit.
[340] Metellus his riotous Pontifical Supper, the great variety whereat is to be seen in Macrobius.
[341] Nero in his flight. Sueton.
[342] Caldæ gelidæque minister.
[343] In Tabula Smaragdina.
[344] Lewis the Eleventh. Qui nescit dissimulare nescit Regnare.