These are my drowsie days; in vain
I do not wake to sleep again:
O come that hour, when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever.
This is the Dormative[1] I take to bedward; I need no other Laudanum than this to make me sleep; after which I close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of the Sun, and sleep unto the Resurrection.
XIII. The method I should use in distributive Justice,[2] I often observe in commutative;[3] and keep a Geometrical proportion in both, whereby becoming equable to others, I become unjust to my self, and supererogate[4] in that common principle. Do unto others as thou wouldst be done unto thy self. I was not born unto riches, neither is it, I think, my Star to be wealthy; or, if it were, the freedom of my mind, and frankness of my disposition, were able to contradict and cross my fates: for to me, avarice seems not so much a vice, as a deplorable piece of madness; to conceive ourselves pipkins, or be perswaded that we are dead, is not so ridiculous, nor so many degrees beyond the power of Hellebore,[5] as this. The opinions of Theory, and positions of men, are not so void of reason as their practised conclusions. Some have held that Snow is black, that the earth moves, that the Soul is air, fire, water; but all this is Philosophy, and there is no delirium, if we do but speculate[6] the folly and indisputable dotage of avarice. To that subterraneous Idol and God of the Earth I do confess I am an Atheist; I cannot perswade myself to honour that the World adores; whatsoever virtue its prepared substance[7] may have within my body, it hath no influence nor operation without. I would not entertain a base design, or an action that should call me villain, for the Indies; and for this only do I love and honour my own soul, and have methinks two arms too few to embrace myself. Aristotle is too severe, that will not allow us to be truely liberal without wealth, and the bountiful hand
- ↑ Sleeping draft.
- ↑ Distribution of rewards and punishments according to the desert of each.
- ↑ The justice which is corrective in transactions between man and man, exercised in arithmetical proportion. The distinction is made by Aristotle.
- ↑ Do more than is necessary.
- ↑ Used as a remedy for madness.
- ↑ Consider.
- ↑ Gold was commonly used as a medicine.
