To stand unshaken in such a calamity is hardly to be expected, and our wonder can but be equal to our grief. Let this accident teach us to provide against all possibilities that fall within the power of fortune. All external things are under her dominion: one while she calls our hands to her assistance; another while she contents herself with her own force, and destroys us with mischiefs of which we cannot find the author. No time, place, or condition, is excepted; she makes our very pleasures painful to us; she makes war upon us in the depth of peace, and turns the means of our security into an occasion of fear; she turns a friend into an enemy, and makes a foe of a companion; we suffer the effects of war without any adversary; and rather than fail, our felicity shall be the cause of our destruction. Lest we should either forget or neglect her power, every day produces something extraordinary. She persecutes the most temperate with sickness, the strongest constitutions with the phthisis; she brings the innocent to punishment, and the most retired she assaults with tumults. Those glories that have grown up with many ages, with infinite labor and expense, and under the favor of many auspicious providences, one day scatters and brings to nothing. He that pronounced a day, nay, an hour, sufficient for the destruction of the greatest empire, might have fallen to a moment. It were some comfort yet to the frailty of mankind and of human affairs, if things might but decay as slowly as they rise; but they grow by degrees, and they fall to ruin in an instant. There is no felicity in anything either private or public; men, nations, and cities, have all their fates and periods; our very entertainments are not without terror, and our calamity rises there where we least expect it. Those kingdoms that stood the shock both of foreign wars and civil, come to destruction without the sight of an enemy. Nay, we are to dread our peace and felicity more than violence, because we are here taken unprovided; unless in a state of peace we do the duty of men in war, and say to ourselves, _Whatsoever may be, will be_. I am to-day safe and happy in the love of my country; I am to-morrow banished: to-day in pleasure, peace, health; to-morrow broken upon a wheel, led in triumph, and in the agony of sickness. Let us therefore prepare for a shipwreck in the port, and for a tempest in a calm. One violence drives me from my country, another ravishes that from me; and that very place where a man can hardly pass this day for a crowd may be to-morrow a desert. Wherefore let us set before our eyes the whole condition of human nature, and consider as well what _may_ happen as what commonly _does_. The way to make future calamities easy to us in the sufferance, is to make them familiar to us in the contemplation. How many cities in Asia, Achaia, Assyria, Macedonia, have been swallowed up by earthquakes? nay, whole countries are lost, and large provinces laid under water;