days of dotage; and stand in need of Æson’s bath[59] before threescore. [L] _Ep._ lib. xxiv. ep. 24. _Sect._ 43.--And truly there goes a deal of providence to produce a man’s life unto threescore; there is more required than an able temper for those years: though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for seventy, yet I perceive in some it gives no light past thirty: men assign not all the causes of long life, that write whole books thereof. They that found themselves on the radical balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is therefore a secret gloom or bottom of our days: ’twas his wisdom to determine them: but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accomplisheth them; wherein the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of God, in a secret and disputed way, do execute his will. Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that die about thirty: they fall but like the whole world, whose solid and well-composed substance must not expect the duration and period of its constitution: when all things are completed in it, its age is accomplished; and the last and general fever may as naturally destroy it before six thousand,[60] as me before forty. There is therefore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature: we are not only ignorant in antipathies and occult qualities; our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our days is drawn by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible; wherein, though we confess our ignorance, I am sure we do not err if we say, it is the hand of God. _Sect._ 44.--I am much taken with two verses of Lucan, since I have been able not only, as we do at school, to construe, but understand: “_Victurosque Dei celant ut vivere durent, Felix esse mori._”[M] [M] _Pharsalia_, iv. 519. We’re all deluded, vainly searching ways To make us happy by the length of days; For cunningly, to make’s protract this breath, The gods conceal the happiness of death.