both very excellent persons, labored under very uncouth and
calamitous distempers. We only beg of them, if they will own their
own diseases and not by noisy rants and popular harangues incur the
imputation of false bravery, either not to take the health of the
whole body for the ground of their content, or else not to say that
men under the extremities of dolors and diseases can yet rally and
be pleasant. For a sound and hale constitution of body is indeed a
thing that often happens, but a firm and steadfast assurance of its
continuance can never befall an intelligent mind. But as at sea
(according to Aeschylus)

Night to the ablest pilot trouble brings,
(Aechylus, "Suppliants," 770.)

and so will a calm too, for no man knows what will be,--so likewise
is it impossible for a soul that dwells in a healthful body, and
that places her good in the hopes she hath of that body, to perfect
her voyage here without frights or waves. For man's mind hath not,
like the sea, its tempests and storms only from without it, but it
also raises up from within far more and greater disturbances.
And a man may with more reason look for constant fair weather in
the midst of winter than for perpetual exemption from afflictions
in his body. For what else hath given the poets occasion to term
us ephemeral creatures, uncertain and unfixed, and to liken our
lives to leaves that both spring and fall in the lapse of a summer,
but the unhappy, calamitous, and sickly condition of the body,
whose very utmost good we are warned to dread and prevent? For an
exquisite habit, Hippocrates saith, is slippery and hazardous.
And