29. He lived to give a third or fourth edition of it, and after having
passed his hundredth year, died without pain or agony, and like one who
falls asleep. The treatise I mention has been taken notice of by several
eminent authors, and is written with such a spirit of cheerfulness,
religion and good sense, as are the natural concomitants of temperance
and sobriety. The mixture of the old man in it is rather a
recommendation than a discredit to it.




_The Duty of Secrecy._


1. It is related by _Quintus Curtius_, that the _Persians_ always
conceived a lasting and invincible contempt of a man who had violated
the laws of secrecy: for they thought that, however he might be
deficient in the qualities requisite to actual excellence, the negative
virtues at least were always in his power, and though he perhaps could
not speak well if he was to try, it was still easy for him not to speak.

2. In this opinion of the easiness of secrecy, they seem to have
considered it as opposed, not to treachery, but loquacity, and to have
conceived the man, whom they thus censured, not frighted by menaces to
reveal, or bribed by promises to betray, but incited by the mere
pleasure of talking, or some other motive equally trivial, to lay open
his heart with reflection, and to let whatever he knew slip from him,
only for want of power to retain it.