“Incertam frustra, mortales, funeris horam,
               Quaeritis et qua sit mors aditura via.... 
               Poena minor certam subito perferre ruinam;
               Quod timeas, gravius sustinuisse diu.”

["Mortals, in vain you seek to know the uncertain hour of death, and by what channel it will come upon you.”—­Propertius, ii. 27, 1.  “’Tis less painful to undergo sudden destruction; ’tis hard to bear that which you long fear.”—­Incert.  Auct.]

We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life:  the one torments, the other frights us.  It is not against death that we prepare, that is too momentary a thing; a quarter of an hour’s suffering, without consequence and without damage, does not deserve especial precepts:  to say the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations of death.  Philosophy ordains that we should always have death before our eyes, to see and consider it before the time, and then gives us rules and precautions to provide that this foresight and thought do us no harm; just so do physicians, who throw us into diseases, to the end they may have whereon to employ their drugs and their art.  If we have not known how to live, ’tis injustice to teach us how to die, and make the end difform from all the rest; if we have known how to live firmly and quietly, we shall know how to die so too.  They may boast as much as they please: 

          “Tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est;”

     ["The whole life of philosophers is the meditation of death.” 
     —­Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 30.]

but I fancy that, though it be the end, it is not the aim of life; ’tis its end, its extremity, but not, nevertheless, its object; it ought itself to be its own aim and design; its true study is to order, govern, and suffer itself.  In the number of several other offices, that the general and principal chapter of Knowing how to live comprehends, is this article of Knowing how to die; and, did not our fears give it weight, one of the lightest too.

To judge of them by utility and by the naked truth, the lessons of simplicity are not much inferior to those which learning teaches us:  nay, quite the contrary.  Men differ in sentiment and force; we must lead them to their own good according to their capacities and by various ways: 

          “Quo me comque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.”

     ["Wherever the season takes me,(where the tempest drives me)
     there I am carried as a guest.”—­Horace, Ep., i. i, 15.]

I never saw any peasant among my neighbours cogitate with what countenance and assurance he should pass over his last hour; nature teaches him not to think of death till he is dying; and then he does it with a better grace than Aristotle, upon whom death presses with a double weight, both of itself and from so long a premeditation; and, therefore, it was the opinion of Caesar, that the least premeditated death was the easiest and the most happy: