The sons of mortal parents must expect a mortal posterity—death is the end of great and small. We are born helpless, and exposed to the injuries of all creatures and of all weathers. The very necessaries of life are deadly to us; we meet with our fate in our dishes, in our cups, and in the very air we breathe; nay, our very birth is inauspicious, for we come into the world weeping, and in the middle of our designs, while we are meditating great matters, and stretching of our thoughts to after ages, death cuts us off, and our longest date is only the revolution of a few years. One man dies at the table; another goes away in his sleep, a third in his mistress’s arms, a fourth is stabbed, another is stung with an adder, or crushed with the fall of a house. We have several ways to our end, but the end itself, which is death, is still the same. Whether we die by a sword, by a halter, by a potion, or by a disease, it is all but _death_. A child dies in the swaddling-clouts, and an old man at a hundred—they are both mortal alike, though the one goes sooner than the other. All that lies betwixt the cradle and the grave is uncertain. If we compute the _troubles_, the life even of a child is long: if the _sweetness_ of the _passage_, that of an old man is short; the whole is slippery and deceitful, and only death certain; and yet all people complain of that which never deceived any man. Senecio raised himself from a small beginning to a vast fortune, being very well skilled in the faculties both of getting and of keeping, and either of them was sufficient for the doing of his business. He was a man infinitely careful both of his patrimony and of his body. He gave me a morning’s visit, (says our author,) and after that visit he went away and spent the rest of the day with a friend of his that was desperately sick. At night, he was merry at supper, and seized immediately after with a quinsy which dispatched him in a few hours.