It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine ever to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going?+and yet there is no journey but hath its end. But if company will make it more pleasant, or more easie to you, does not all the world go the self same way? omnia te vita perfuncta sequentur.-Ibidem. When thou art dead, let this thy comfort be, Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there any thing that does not grow old as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, and a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you expire. Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora secuta est, Ploratus, mortis comites, et funeris atri.-Lucret. l. 2. No night succeeds the day, nor mornings light And dirges fitting fun'ral obsequies. To what end should you endeavour to avoid, unless there were a possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have received so great a benefit by dying, as thereby to be manifestly deliver'd from infallible miseries; but have you talked with any of those who have feared a disadvantage by it? It must therefore needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. "Why (says Nature) dost thou complain of me and destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee to govern us, or for us to dispose of thee? Though peradventure, thy age may not be accomplish'd, yet thy life is. A man of low stature is as much a man as a gyant; neither men, nor their lives, are measured by the ell. Chiron refus'd to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the God of time it self, and its duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable an immortal and painful life would be to man than what I have already design'd him. If you had not death to ease you of your pains and cares, you would eternally curse me for having depriv'd you of the benefit of dying. I have, 'tis true mixt a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what conveniency and use it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so establish'd in 78 DEATH MADE TERRIBLE BY THE PREPARATIONS OF OUR FRIENDS. this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have an antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have temper'd the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain: and 'twas I that first taught Thales, the most eminent of all your sages, that to live and to die were indifferent; which made him very wisely answer him who ask'd him, Why then did he not die? because (says he) it is indifferent. The elements of water, earth, fire, and air, and the other parts of this creation of thine, are no more the instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day, it contributes no more to thy dissolution than every one of the rest? The last step is not the cause of lassitude, it does but confess it. Every day travels towards death, the last only arrives at it."These are the good lessons our mother nature teaches. I have often consider'd with my self whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look upon it as to our own particular danger, or that of another, should without comparison appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses, (for if it were not so, it would be an army of whining milksops) and that being still in all places the same, there should be notwithstanding much more assurance in peasants, and the meaner sort of people, than others of better quality and education: and I do verily believe, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrifie us than the thing it self; a new quite contrary way of living, the cries of mothers, wives and children, the visits of astonish'd and afflicted friends, the attendance of pale and blubbering servants, a dark room set round with burning tapers, our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us, render it so formidable, that a man almost fancies himself dead and buried already. Children are afraid even of those they love best, and are best acquainted with, when disguised in a vizor, and so are we; the vizor must be removed as well from things as persons; which being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that a mean servant, or a poor chamber-maid, died a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension or concern. Happy therefore is the death that deprives us of leisure to prepare things requisite for this unnecessary pomp, a pomp that only renders that more terrible which ought not to be fear'd, and that no man upon earth can possibly avoid. CHAP. XX.-OF THE FORCE OF IMAGINATION. "FORTIS imaginatio generat casum,”—Axion Scholast. "A strong imagination begets accident, say the school-men." I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination: every one is justled, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very great impression upon me : and I make it my business to avoid wanting force to resist it. I could live by the sole help of heathful and jolly company. The very sight of anothers pain does materially work upon me, and I naturally usurp the sense of a third person to share with him in his torment. A perpetual cough in another tickles my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick I love, and am by duty interested to look after, than those I care not for, and from whom I have no expectation. I take possession of the disease I am concern'd at and lay it too much to heart, and do not at all wonder that fancy should distribute fevers, and sometimes kill such as allow too much scope, and are too willing to entertain it. Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time: I remember, that hapning one day at Tholouze to meet him at a rich old fellows house, who was troubled with naughty lungs, and discoursing with his patient about the method of his cure; he told him, that one thing which would be very conducing to it, was, to give me such occasion to be pleased with his company, that I might come often to see him, by which means and by fixing his eyes upon the freshness of my complexion, and his imagination upon the sprightliness and vigour that glowed in my youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I then was, his habit of body might peradventure be amended, but he forgot to say that mine at the same time might be made worse. Gallus Vibius so long cudgell'd his brains to find out the essence and motions of folly, till by the inquisition, in the end he went directly out of his wits, and to such a degree, that he could never after recover his judgment; and he might brag that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through fear prevent the hangman; like him whose eyes being unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the scaffold, by the stroak of imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale, and blush, as we are variously mov'd by imagination; and being a-bed, feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes to expire. And boyling youth when fast asleep, grows so warm with fancy, as in a dream to satisfie amorous desires. Ut quasi transactis sæpe omnibus rebus, profundant Who fansie gulling lyes, his enflam'd mind Lays his love tribute there, where not design'd. Although it be no new thing to see horns grown in a night on the fore-head of one that had none when he went to bed; notwithstanding, what befell Cyppus, a noble Roman, is very memorable; who having one day been a very delighted spectator of a bull-baiting, and having all the night dreamt that he had horns on his head, did by the force of imagination, really cause them to grow there. Passion made the son of Croesus to speak, who was born dumb, by that means supplying him 80 POWER OF IMAGINATION OVER ORDINARY MINDS. with so necessary a faculty, which nature had deny'd him. And Antiochus fell into a fever, enflam'd with the beauty of Stratonissa, too deeply imprinted in his soul. Pliny pretends to have seen Lucius Crossitius, who from a woman was turn'd into a man upon her very wedding day. Pontanus, and others, report the like metamorphoses that in these latter days have hapned in Italy, and through the vehement desires of him and his mother Vota puer solvit, quæ fœmina voverat Iphis.—Ovid. Iphis, a boy, the vow defray'd That he had promis'd when a maid. A woman fansying she had swallowed a piece of bread, cry'd out of an intolerable pain in her throat, where she thought she felt it stick but an ingenious fellow that was brought to her, seeing no outward tumour nor alteration, supposing it only to be conceit taken at some crust of bread that had hurt her as it went down, caus'd her to vomit, and cunningly, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the bason, which the woman no sooner saw, but believing she had cast it up, she presently found her self eas'd of her pain. I my self knew a gentleman, who having treated a great deal of good company at his house, three or four days after bragg'd in jest (for there was no such thing) that he had made them eat of a bak'd cat; at which, a young gentlewoman, who had been at the feast, took such a horror, that falling into a violent vomiting and a fever, there was no possible means to save her. Even brute beasts are also subject to the force of imagination as well as we; as is seen by dogs, who die of grief for the loss of their masters, and are seen to quest, tremble, and start, as horses will kick and whinney in their sleep. Now all this may be attributed to the affinity and relation betwixt the souls and bodies of brutes, but 'tis quite another thing when the imagination works upon the souls of rational men, and not only to the prejudice of their own particular bodies, but of others also. And as an infected body communicates its malady to those that approach, or live near it, as we see in the plague, the small pox, and sore eyes that run through whole families and cities; Dum spectant oculi læsos, læduntur et ipsi : Multaque corporibus transitione nocent.-Ovid. Amor. l. 2. So the imagination being vehemently agitated, darts out infection capable of offending the stranger object. The ancients had an opinion of certain women of Scythia, that being animated and inrag'd against any one, they kill'd them only with their looks. Tortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs with only looking on them, which inferrs, that their eyes have in them some ejaculative vertue. And the eyes of witches are said to be dangerous and hurtful. Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos.-Virg. Eclog. 3. What eye it is, I do not know, My tender lambs bewitches so. Magicians are no very good authority for me, but we experimentally sce, that women impart the marks of their fancy to the children they carry in their wombs; witness her that was brought to bed of a moor: and there was presented to Charles the Emperour, and king of Bohemia, a girl from about Pisa, all over-rough and cover'd with hair, whom her mother said to be so conceiv'd by reason of a picture of St John Baptist, that hung within the curtains of her bed. It is the same with beasts, witness Jacob's ring-streaked and spotted goats, and sheep, and the hares and partridges that the snow turns white upon the mountains. There was at my house a little while ago, a cat seen watching a bird upon the top of a tree, who for some time mutually fixing their eyes upon one another, the bird at last let her self fall as dead into the cats claws, either dazled and astonish'd by the force of her own imagination, or drawn by some attractive power of the cat. Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field, have, I make no question, heard the story of the faulconer, who having earnestly fix'd his eyes upon a kite in the air, lay'd a wager, that he would bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it was said; for the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of those from whom I have them. The discourses are my own, and found themselves upon the proofs of reason, not of experience; to which every one has liberty to add his own examples: and who has none, (the number and varieties of accidents consider'd) let him not forbear to believe that these I set down are enough: and if I do not apply them well, let some other do it for me. And also in the subjects of which I treat, viz. of our manners and motions, the testimonies and instances I produce, how fabulous soever, provided they are possible, serve as well as the true; whether it has really happen'd or no, at Rome or at Paris, to Peter or John, 'tis still within the verge of possibility, and human capacity, which serves me to good use, and supplies me with variety in the things I write. I see, and make my advantage of it as well in shadow as in substance; and amongst the various examples I every where meet with in history, I cull out the most rare and memorable to fit my own turn. There are some authors whose only end and design it is, to give an account of things that have hapned; mine, if I could arrive unto it, should be to deliver what may come to pass. There is a just liberty allow'd in the schools, of supposing and contriving similes, when they are at a loss for them in their own reading: I do not, however, make any use of that privilege, and as to that affair in superstitious religion surpass all historical authority. In the examples which I here bring in of what I have heard, read, done, or said, I have forbid my self to dare to alter even the most light and indifferent circumstances; my con F |