to any other, or by any other than myself.  I leave no stone unturned, to do without it, rather than employ the bounty of another in any light or important occasion or necessity whatever.  My friends strangely trouble me when they ask me to ask a third person; and I think it costs me little less to disengage him who is indebted to me, by making use of him, than to engage myself to him who owes me nothing.  These conditions being removed, and provided they require of me nothing if any great trouble or care (for I have declared mortal war against all care), I am very ready to do every one the best service I can.  I have been very willing to seek occasion to do people a good turn, and to attach them to me; and methinks there is no more agreeable employment for our means.  But I have yet more avoided receiving than sought occasions of giving, and moreover, according to Aristotle, it is more easy., My fortune has allowed me but little to do others good withal, and the little it can afford, is put into a pretty close hand.  Had I been born a great person, I should have been ambitious to have made myself beloved, not to make myself feared or admired:  shall I more plainly express it?  I should more have endeavoured to please than to profit others.  Cyrus very wisely, and by the mouth of a great captain, and still greater philosopher, prefers his bounty and benefits much before his valour and warlike conquests; and the elder Scipio, wherever he would raise himself in esteem, sets a higher value upon his affability and humanity, than on his prowess and victories, and has always 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!”