and sold for a slave, who being by his master commanded to some base employment:  “Thou shalt see,” says the boy, “whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty,” and having so said, threw himself from the top of the house.  Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians, that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of his:  “If thou threatenest us with more than death,” replied they, “we shall the more willingly die”; and to Philip, having written them word that he would frustrate all their enterprises:  “What, wilt thou also hinder us from dying?” This is the meaning of the sentence, “That the wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all colour of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out.  We may be straitened for earth to live upon, but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus answered the Romans.”—­[Tacitus, Annal., xiii. 56.]—­Why dost thou complain of this world? it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.  There needs no more to die but to will to die: 

               “Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit deus. 
               Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
               At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.”

     ["Death is everywhere:  heaven has well provided for that.  Any one
     may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death.  To death
     there are a thousand avenues.”—­Seneca, Theb:, i, I, 151.]

Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure of all; ’tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very often to be sought.  It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s the end of the clue.  The most voluntary death is the finest.  Life depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.  We ought not to accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this.  Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; ’tis folly to be concerned by any such apprehension.  Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.  The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually.  Why is not the jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein?  For a desperate disease a desperate cure.  Servius the grammarian, being tormented with the gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his