LETTERS
325
reigns. But when they have let it go, they come and put it into their hands again, that they may play on, as you may see in Queen Elizabeth.
I will conclude with a prayer (not that I think it needs at this present: prayers are to keep us from what may be, as well as to preserve us from what is), that the King be neither too insensible of what is without him, nor too resolved from what is within him. To be sick of a dangerous sickness and find no pain cannot but be with loss of understanding ('tis an aphorism of Hippocrates).
And on the other side Opiniastry is a sullen Porter, and (as it was wittily said of Constancy) shuts out oftentimes better things than it lets in.
