no talk of their future condition; amongst sports, feastings, wit, and mirth, common and indifferent discourses, music, and amorous verses.  Were it not possible for us to imitate this resolution after a more decent manner?  Since there are deaths that are good for fools, deaths good for the wise, let us find out such as are fit for those who are betwixt both.  My imagination suggests to me one that is easy, and, since we must die, to be desired.  The Roman tyrants thought they did, in a manner, give a criminal life when they gave him the choice of his death.  But was not Theophrastus, that so delicate, so modest, and so wise a philosopher, compelled by reason, when he durst say this verse, translated by Cicero: 

“Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia?”

               ["Fortune, not wisdom, sways human life.” 
               —­Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., V. 31.]

Fortune assists the facility of the bargain of my life, having placed it in such a condition that for the future it can be neither advantage nor hindrance to those who are concerned in me; ’tis a condition that I would have accepted at any time of my life; but in this occasion of trussing up my baggage, I am particularly pleased that in dying I shall neither do them good nor harm.  She has so ordered it, by a cunning compensation, that they who may pretend to any considerable advantage by my death will, at the same time, sustain a material inconvenience.  Death sometimes is more grievous to us, in that it is grievous to others, and interests us in their interest as much as in our own, and sometimes more.

In this conveniency of lodging that I desire, I mix nothing of pomp and amplitude—­I hate it rather; but a certain plain neatness, which is oftenest found in places where there is less of art, and that Nature has adorned with some grace that is all her own: 

“Non ampliter, sea munditer convivium.”

     ["To eat not largely, but cleanly.”—­Nepos, Life of Atticus, c. 13]

“Plus salis quam sumptus.”

     ["Rather enough than costly (More wit than cost)”—­Nonius, xi. 19.]

And besides, ’tis for those whose affairs compel them to travel in the depth of winter through the Grisons country to be surprised upon the way with great inconveniences.  I, who, for the most part, travel for my pleasure, do not order my affairs so ill.  If the way be foul on my right hand, I turn on my left; if I find myself unfit to ride, I stay where I am; and, so doing, in earnest I see nothing that is not as pleasant and commodious as my own house.  ’Tis true that I always find superfluity superfluous, and observe a kind of trouble even in abundance itself.  Have I left anything behind me unseen, I go back to see it; ’tis still on my way; I trace no certain line, either straight or crooked.—­[Rousseau has translated this passage in his Emile, book v.]—­Do I not find in the place to which I go what was reported to me—­as it often falls out that the judgments of others do not jump with mine, and that I have found their reports for the most part false—­I never complain of losing my labour:  I have, at least, informed myself that what was told me was not true.