this glorious saying in his mouth:  “That he has given his enemies as much occasion to love him as his friends.”  I will then say, that if a man must, of necessity, owe something, it ought to be by a more legitimate title than that whereof I am speaking, to which the necessity of this miserable war compels me; and not in so great a debt as that of my total preservation both of life and fortune:  it overwhelms me.

I have a thousand times gone to bed in my own house with an apprehension that I should be betrayed and murdered that very night; compounding with fortune, that it might be without terror and with quick despatch; and, after my Paternoster, I have cried out,

          “Impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit!”

["Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?”
—­Virgil, Ecl., i. 71.]

What remedy? ’tis the place of my birth, and that of most of my ancestors; they have here fixed their affection and name.  We inure ourselves to whatever we are accustomed to; and in so miserable a condition as ours is, custom is a great bounty of nature, which benumbs out senses to the sufferance of many evils.  A civil war has this with it worse than other wars have, to make us stand sentinels in our own houses.

              “Quam miserum, porta vitam muroque tueri,
               Vixque suae tutum viribus esse domus!”

["’Tis miserable to protect one’s life by doors and walls, and to be
scarcely safe in one’s own house.”—­Ovid, Trist., iv.  I, 69.]

’Tis a grievous extremity for a man to be jostled even in his own house and domestic repose.  The country where I live is always the first in arms and the last that lays them down, and where there is never an absolute peace: 

         “Tunc quoque, cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli.... 
          Quoties Romam fortuna lacessit;
          Hac iter est bellis....  Melius, Fortuna, dedisses
          Orbe sub Eco sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto,
          Errantesque domos.”

["Even when there’s peace, there is here still the dear of war when
Fortune troubles peace, this is ever the way by which war passes.” 
—­Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 67.]

["We might have lived happier in the remote East or in the icy
North, or among the wandering tribes.”—­Lucan, i. 255.]

I sometimes extract the means to fortify myself against these considerations from indifference and indolence, which, in some sort, bring us on to resolution.  It often befalls me to imagine and expect mortal dangers with a kind of delight:  I stupidly plunge myself headlong into death, without considering or taking a view of it, as into a deep and obscure abyss which swallows me up at one leap, and involves me in an instant in a profound sleep, without any sense of pain.  And in these short and violent deaths, the consequence that I foresee administers more consolation to me than the effect does fear.  They say, that