Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales:  rather consult effects and experience.  According to the common course of things, ’tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life.  And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age.  It is full both of reason and piety, too, to take example by the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended His life at three-and-thirty years.  The greatest man, that was no more than a man, Alexander, died also at the same age.  How many several ways has death to surprise us?

              “Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis
               Cautum est in horas.”

["Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that
may at any hour befal him.”—­Hor.  O. ii. 13, 13.]

To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke of Brittany,—­[Jean ii. died 1305.]—­should be pressed to death in a crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into Lyons?—­[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux.  Bertrand le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]—­Hast thou not seen one of our kings—­[Henry ii., killed in a tournament, July 10, 1559]—­killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by jostle of a hog?—­[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]—­AEschylus, threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air.  Another was choked with a grape-stone;—­[Val.  Max., ix. 12, ext. 2.]—­an emperor killed with the scratch of a comb in combing his head.  AEmilius Lepidus with a stumble at his own threshold,—­[Pliny, Nat.  Hist., vii. 33.]—­ and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the council-chamber.  And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes.  The poor judge Bebius gave adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired.  Whilst Caius Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who had already given sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, which, as it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it, nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow.