engage my selfe in sicknesse, I doe naturally fall into some
disdaine and contempt of life. I finde that I have more adoe to
digest this resolution, that I shall die when I am in health, than I
have when I am troubled with a fever: forsomuch as I have no more
such fast hold on the commodities of life, whereof I begin to lose
the use and pleasure, and view death in the face with a lesse
undanted looke, which makes me hope, that the further I goe from
that, and the nearer I approach to this, so much more easily doe I
enter in composition for their exchange. Even as I have tried in
many other occurrences, which Caesar affirmed, that often some
things seeme greater, being farre from us, than if they bee neere at
hand: I have found that being in perfect health, I have much more
beene frighted with sicknesse, than when I have felt it. The
jollitie wherein I live, the pleasure and the strength make the
other seeme so disproportionable from that, that by imagination I
amplifie these commodities by one moitie, and apprehended them much
more heavie and burthensome, than I feele them when I have them upon
my shoulders. The same I hope will happen to me of death. Consider
we by the ordinary mutations, and daily declinations which we
suffer, how Nature deprives us of the sight of our losse and
empairing; what hath an aged man left him of his youths vigor, and
of his forepast life?

Heu senibus vita portio quanta manet
[Footnote: Com. Gal. 1. i. 16.]

Alas to men in yeares how small
A part of life is left in all?

Caesar, to a tired and crazed [Footnote: diseased] Souldier of his