devil) was the best that ever they had;--[Herodotus, vi. 68.]--by this
means attributing to his quality the praise that only belongs to merit,
and that of right is due to supreme desert, though lodged in the lowest
and most inferior subject.

Aristotle, who will still have a hand in everything, makes a 'quaere'
upon the saying of Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is
dead: "whether, then, he who has lived and died according to his heart's
desire, if he have left an ill repute behind him, and that his posterity
be miserable, can be said to be happy?" Whilst we have life and motion,
we convey ourselves by fancy and preoccupation, whither and to what we
please; but once out of being, we have no more any manner of
communication with that which is, and it had therefore been better said
by Solon that man is never happy, because never so, till he is no more.

"Quisquam
Vix radicitus e vita se tollit, et eicit;
Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse,
Nec removet satis a projecto corpore sese, et
Vindicat."

["Scarcely one man can, even in dying, wholly detach himself from
the idea of life; in his ignorance he must needs imagine that there
is in him something that survives him, and cannot sufficiently
separate or emancipate himself from his remains"
--Lucretius, iii. 890.]

Bertrand de Guesclin, dying at the siege of the Castle of Rancon, near
unto Puy, in Auvergne, the besieged were afterwards, upon surrender,
enjoined to lay down the keys of the place upon the corpse of the dead