of factions, the unsteadiness of counsels, the infidelity of friends; nor do I think the rest of my life enough to make any new experiments. 'For the ease of my own life, if I know myself, it will be infinitely more in the retired, than it has been in the busy scene: for no good man can, with any satisfaction, take part in the divisions of his country, that knows and considers, as I do, what they have cost Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Florence, Germany, France and England: nor can the wisest man foresee how ours will end, or what they are like to cost the rest of Christendom as well as ourselves. I never had but two aims in public affairs; one, to see the king great as he may be by the hearts of his people, without which I know not how he can be great by the constitutions of this kingdom: the other, in case our factions must last, yet to see a revenue established for the constant maintaining a fleet of fifty men of war, at sea or in harbour, and the seamen in constant pay; which would be at least our safety from abroad, and make the crown still considered in any foreign alliances, whether the king and his parliaments should agree or not in undertaking any great or national war. And such an establishment I was in hopes the last parliament at Westminster might have agreed in with the king, by adding so much of a new fund to three hundred thousand pounds a year out of the present customs. But these have both failed, and I am content to have failed with them. 'And so I take leave of all those airy visions which have so long busied my head about mending the world; and at the same time, of all those shining toys or follies that employ the thoughts of busy men: and shall turn mine wholly to mend myself; and, as far as consists with a private condition, still pursuing that old and excellent counsel of Pythagoras, that we are, with all the cares and endeavours of our lives, to avoid diseases in the body, perturbations in the mind, luxury in diet, factions in the house, and seditions in the state.' CHAPTER XI. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY.