other operations submit to the rules of decency; this cannot so much as in imagination appear other than vicious or ridiculous:  find out, if you can, therein any serious and discreet procedure.  Alexander said, that he chiefly knew himself to be mortal by this act and sleeping; sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of the soul; the familiarity with women likewise dissipates and exhausts them:  doubtless ’tis a mark, not only of our original corruption, but also of our vanity and deformity.

On the one side, nature pushes us on to it, having fixed the most noble, useful, and pleasant of all her functions to this desire:  and, on the other side, leaves us to accuse and avoid it, as insolent and indecent, to blush at it, and to recommend abstinence.  Are we not brutes to call that work brutish which begets us?  People of so many differing religions have concurred in several proprieties, as sacrifices, lamps, burning incense, fasts, and offerings; and amongst others, in the condemning this act:  all opinions tend that way, besides the widespread custom of circumcision, which may be regarded as a punishment.  We have, peradventure, reason to blame ourselves for being guilty of so foolish a production as man, and to call the act, and the parts that are employed in the act, shameful (mine, truly, are now shameful and pitiful).  The Essenians, of whom Pliny speaks, kept up their country for several ages without either nurse or baby-clouts, by the arrival of strangers who, following this pretty humour, came continually to them:  a whole nation being resolute, rather to hazard a total extermination, than to engage themselves in female embraces, and rather to lose the succession of men, than to beget one.  ’Tis said, that Zeno never had to do with a woman but once in his life, and then out of civility, that he might not seem too obstinately to disdain the sex.

     [Diogenes Laertius, vii. 13.—­What is there said, however, is that
     Zeno seldom had commerce with boys, lest he should be deemed a very
     misogynist.]

Every one avoids seeing a man born, every one runs to see him die; to destroy him a spacious field is sought out in the face of the sun, but, to make him, we creep into as dark and private a corner as we can:  ’tis a man’s duty to withdraw himself bashfully from the light to create; but ’tis glory and the fountain of many virtues to know how to destroy what we have made:  the one is injury, the other favour:  for Aristotle says that to do any one a kindness, in a certain phrase of his country, is to kill him.  The Athenians, to couple the disgrace of these two actions, having to purge the Isle of Delos, and to justify themselves to Apollo, interdicted at once all births and burials in the precincts thereof: 

“Nostri nosmet paenitet.”

          ["We are ashamed of ourselves.”—­Terence, Phoymio, i. 3, 20.]