The sentiment of present death sometimes, of itself, animates us with a
prompt resolution not to avoid a thing that is utterly inevitable: many
gladiators have been seen in the olden time, who, after having fought
timorously and ill, have courageously entertained death, offering their
throats to the enemies' sword and bidding them despatch. The sight of
future death requires a courage that is slow, and consequently hard to be
got. If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at
the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you: she will exactly do that
business for you; take you no care--

"Incertam frustra, mortales, funeris horam,
Quaeritis et qua sit mors aditura via....
Poena minor certam subito perferre ruinam;
Quod timeas, gravius sustinuisse diu."

["Mortals, in vain you seek to know the uncertain hour of death,
and by what channel it will come upon you."--Propertius, ii. 27, 1.
"'Tis less painful to undergo sudden destruction; 'tis hard to bear
that which you long fear."--Incert. Auct.]

We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life: the
one torments, the other frights us. It is not against death that we
prepare, that is too momentary a thing; a quarter of an hour's suffering,
without consequence and without damage, does not deserve especial
precepts: to say the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations
of death. Philosophy ordains that we should always have death before our
eyes, to see and consider it before the time, and then gives us rules and
precautions to provide that this foresight and thought do us no harm;
just so do physicians, who throw us into diseases, to the end they may