"Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis
Cautum est in horas."

["Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that
may at any hour befal him."--Hor. O. ii. 13, 13.]

To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke
of Brittany,--[Jean II. died 1305.]--should be pressed to death in a
crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into
Lyons?--[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary
neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Bertrand
le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]--Hast thou not
seen one of our kings--[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10,
1559]--killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by
jostle of a hog?--[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]--AEschylus,
threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to
avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise
falling out of an eagle's talons in the air. Another was choked with a
grape-stone;--[Val. Max., ix. 12, ext. 2.]--an emperor killed with
the scratch of a comb in combing his head. AEmilius Lepidus with a
stumble at his own threshold,--[Pliny, Nat. Hist., vii. 33.]--
and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the
council-chamber. And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus
the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of
Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a
Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. The poor judge Bebius gave
adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was
condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired. Whilst Caius
Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed
his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of