covered their head with cypress, and hid their crowns in an inglorious grave.

For what can all the world minister to a sick person, if it represents all the spoils of nature, and the choicest delicacies of land and sea? Alas! his appetite is lost, and to see a pebblestone is more pleasing to him; for he can look upon that without loathing, but not so upon the most delicious fare that ever made famous the

Roman luxury. Perfumes make his head ache. If you load him with jewels, you press him with a burthen as troublesome as his grave-stone. And what pleasure is in all those possessions that cannot make his pillow easy, nor tame the rebellion of a tumultuous humor, nor restore the use of a withered hand, or straighten a crooked finger? Vain is the hope of that man whose soul rests upon vanity, and such unprofitable possessions.

Suppose a man lord of all this world, a universal monarch, as some princes have lately designed; all that cannot minister content to him; not that content which a poor contemplative man, by the strength of Christian philosophy, and the support of a very small fortune, daily does enjoy. All his power and greatness cannot command the sea to overflow his shores, or to stay from retiring to the opposite strand.

It cannot make his children dutiful or wise. And though the world admired at the greatness of Philip the Second's fortune, in the accession of Portugal and the East Indies to his principalities; yet this could not allay the infelicity of his family, and the unhandsomeness of his condition, in having a proud, and indiscreet, and a vicious young prince likely to inherit all his greatness. And if nothing appears in the face of such a fortune to tell all the world that it is spotted and imperfect; yet there is in all conditions of the world such weariness and tediousness of spirits, that a man is ever more pleased with hopes of going off from the present, than in dwelling upon that condition which, it may be, others admire and think beauteous, but none knoweth the smart of it but he that drank off the little pleasure, and felt the ill relish of the appendage. How many kings have groaned under the burthen of their crowns, and have sunk down and died! How many have quitted their pompous cares, and retired into private lives, there to enjoy the pleasures of philosophy and religion, which their thrones denied!

That is a sad condition, when, like Midas, all that the man touches shall turn to gold: and his is no better, to whom a perpetual full table, not recreated with fasting, not made pleasant

his eyes.

with intervening scarcity, ministers no more good than a heap of gold does; that is, he hath no benefit of it, save the beholding of it with Cannot a man quench his thirst as well out of an urn or chalice, as out of a whole river? It is an ambitious thirst, and a pride of draught, that had rather lay his mouth to Euphrates than to a petty goblet; but if he had rather, it adds not so much to his content, as to his danger and his vanity. For so I have heard of persons whom the river hath swept away together with the turf they pressed, when they stopped to drown their pride rather than their thirst.

EXCELLENCE OF THE SOUL.

If we consider what the soul is in its own capacity to happiness, we shall find it to be an excellency greater than the sun, of an angelical substance, sister to a cherub, an image of the divinity, and the great argument of that mercy whereby God did distinguish us from the lower form of beasts, and trees, and minerals.

The soul is all that whereby we may be, and without which we cannot be, happy. It is not

the eye that sees the beauties of the heaven, nor the ear that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savoury are its perceptions. And if a child beholds the rich ermine, or the 'diamonds of a starry night, or the order of the world, or hears the discourses of an apostle, because he makes no reflex acts upon himself, and sees not that he sees, he can have but the pleasure of a fool, or the deliciousness of a mule. But although the reflection of its own acts be a rare instrument of pleasure or pain respectively, yet the soul's excellence is upon the same reason not perceived by us, by which the sapidness of pleasant things of nature are not understood by a child; even because the soul cannot reflect far enough. For as the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, makes violent and direct emissions of his rays from himself, but reflects them no farther than to the bottom of a cloud, or the lowest imaginary circle of the middle region, and therefore receives not a duplicate of its own heat; so is the soul of man, it reflects upon its own inferior actions of particular sense, or general understanding; but because it knows little of its

own nature, the manners of volition, the immediate instruments of understanding, the way how it comes to meditate, and cannot discern how a sudden thought arrives, or the solution of a doubt not depending upon preceding premises; therefore above half its pleasures are abated, and its own worth less understood: and possibly it is the better it is so. If the elephant knew his strength, or the horse the vigorousness of his own spirit, they would be as rebellious against their rulers as unreasonable men against government: nay the angels themselves, because their light reflected home to their orbs, and they understood all the secrets of their own perfection, they grew vertiginous, and fell from the battlements of heaven.

THE REWARDS OF VIRTUE.

The things of God are the noblest satisfactions to those desires which ought to be cherished and swelled up to infinite; their deliciousness is vast and full of relish; and their very appendant thorns are to be chosen, for they are gilded, they are safe and medicinal, they heal the wound they make, and bring forth fruit of