overthrow what she was so many years in building, making us cry out with
Laberius:

"Nimirum hac die
Una plus vixi mihi, quam vivendum fuit."

["I have lived longer by this one day than I should have
done."--Macrobius, ii. 7.]

And, in this sense, this good advice of Solon may reasonably be taken;
but he, being a philosopher (with which sort of men the favours and
disgraces of Fortune stand for nothing, either to the making a man happy
or unhappy, and with whom grandeurs and powers are accidents of a quality
almost indifferent) I am apt to think that he had some further aim, and
that his meaning was, that the very felicity of life itself, which
depends upon the tranquillity and contentment of a well-descended spirit,
and the resolution and assurance of a well-ordered soul, ought never to
be attributed to any man till he has first been seen to play the last,
and, doubtless, the hardest act of his part. There may be disguise and
dissimulation in all the rest: where these fine philosophical discourses
are only put on, and where accident, not touching us to the quick, gives
us leisure to maintain the same gravity of aspect; but, in this last
scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting: we must speak out plain,
and discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the pot,

"Nam vera; voces turn demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur; et eripitur persona, manet res."

["Then at last truth issues from the heart; the visor's gone,
the man remains."--Lucretius, iii. 57.]