chorister who has rotten lungs, and eloquence to a hermit exiled into the
deserts of Arabia. There needs no art to help a fall; the end finds
itself of itself at the conclusion of every affair. My world is at an
end, my form expired; I am totally of the past, and am bound to authorise
it, and to conform my outgoing to it. I will here declare, by way of
example, that the Pope's late ten days' diminution

[Gregory XIII., in 1582, reformed the Calendar, and, in consequence,
in France they all at once passed from the 9th to the 20th
December.]

has taken me so aback that I cannot well reconcile myself to it; I belong
to the years wherein we kept another kind of account. So ancient and so
long a custom challenges my adherence to it, so that I am constrained to
be somewhat heretical on that point incapable of any, though corrective,
innovation. My imagination, in spite of my teeth, always pushes me ten
days forward or backward, and is ever murmuring in my ears: "This rule
concerns those who are to begin to be." If health itself, sweet as it
is, returns to me by fits, 'tis rather to give me cause of regret than
possession of it; I have no place left to keep it in. Time leaves me;
without which nothing can be possessed. Oh, what little account should I
make of those great elective dignities that I see in such esteem in the
world, that are never conferred but upon men who are taking leave of it;
wherein they do not so much regard how well the man will discharge his
trust, as how short his administration will be: from the very entry they
look at the exit. In short, I am about finishing this man, and not
rebuilding another. By long use, this form is in me turned into
substance, and fortune into nature.

I say, therefore, that every one of us feeble creatures is excusable in