sometimes two or three months, nay, a whole year, as he has told me,
without drinking. He is sometimes thirsty, but he lets it pass over,
and he holds that it is an appetite which easily goes off of itself;
and he drinks more out of caprice than either for need or pleasure.

Here is another example: 'tis not long ago that I found one of the
learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune,
studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with
tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence. He
told me, and Seneca almost says the same of himself, he made an
advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much
the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation,
and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself.
Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the
rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed
himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of
his studies. Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he
could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, "Why," said he, "as
those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing
water." I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily
discomposed; when 'tis bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly
murders it.

Seneca in his youth having warmly espoused the example of Sextius, of
eating nothing that had died, for a whole year dispensed with such food,
and, as he said, with pleasure, and discontinued it that he might not be
suspected of taking up this rule from some new religion by which it was
prescribed: he adopted, in like manner, from the precepts of Attalus a
custom not to lie upon any sort of bedding that gave way under his
weight, and, even to his old age, made use of such as would not yield to