I have observed, that both in wounds and sicknesses, speaking discomposes and hurts me, as much as any irregularity I can commit.  My voice pains and tires me, for ’tis loud and forced; so that when I have gone to a whisper some great persons about affairs of consequence, they have often desired me to moderate my voice.

This story is worth a diversion.  Some one in a certain Greek school speaking loud as I do, the master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak softly:  “Tell him, then, he must send me,” replied the other, “the tone he would have me speak in.”  To which the other replied, “That he should take the tone from the ears of him to whom he spake.”  It was well said, if it is to be understood:  “Speak according to the affair you are speaking about to your auditor,” for if it mean, “’tis sufficient that he hear you, or govern yourself by him,” I do not find it to be reason.  The tone and motion of my voice carries with it a great deal of the expression and signification of my meaning, and ’tis I who am to govern it, to make myself understood:  there is a voice to instruct, a voice to flatter, and a voice to reprehend.  I will not only that my voice reach him, but, peradventure, that it strike and pierce him.  When I rate my valet with sharp and bitter language, it would be very pretty for him to say; “Pray, master, speak lower; I hear you very well”: 

               “Est quaedam vox ad auditum accommodata,
               non magnitudine, sed proprietate.”

     ["There is a certain voice accommodated to the hearing, not by its
     loudness, but by its propriety.”—­Quintilian, xi. 3.]

Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.

Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.  Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.

The constitution of maladies is formed by the pattern of the constitution of animals; they have their fortune and their days limited from their birth; he who attempts imperiously to cut them short by force in the middle of their course, lengthens and multiplies them, and incenses instead of appeasing them.  I am of Crantor’s opinion, that we are neither obstinately and deafly to oppose evils, nor succumb to them from want of courage; but that we are naturally to give way to them, according to their condition and our own.  We ought to grant free passage to diseases; I find they stay less with me, who let them alone; and I have lost some, reputed the most tenacious and obstinate, by their own decay, without help and without art, and contrary to its rules.  Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.  But such an one died