tell you that you yourselves are your own death, and that which you call death, is but the period of your life, as the first moment of your birth is the beginning of your death; and effectually, ye die living, and your bones are no more than what death has left and committed to the grave. If this were rightly understood, every man would find a _memento mori_, or a death’s head, in his own looking-glass; and consider every house with a family in’t but as a sepulchre filled with dead bodies; a truth which you little dream of, though within your daily view and experience. Can you imagine a death elsewhere, and not in yourselves? Believe’t y’are in a shameful mistake; for you yourselves are skeletons before ye are aware.” “But, madam, under favour, what may all these people be that keep your ladyship company? and since you are Death (as you say) how comes it, that the babblers, and make-bates, are nearer your person, and more in your good graces than the physicians?” “Why,” says she, “there are more people talked to death and dispatched by babblers, than by all the pestilential diseases in the world. And then your make-bates, and meddlers kill more than your physicians, though (to give the gentlemen of the faculty their due) they labour night and day for the enlargement of our empire. For you must understand, that though distempered humours make a man sick, ’tis the physician kills him; and looks to be well paid for’t too: (and ’tis fit that every man should live by his trade) so that when a man is asked, what such or such a one died of, he is not presently to make answer, that he died of a fever, pleurisy, the plague, purples, or the like; but that he died of the doctor. In one point, however, I must needs acquit the physician; ye know that the style of right honourable, and right worshipful, which was heretofore appropriate only to persons of eminent degree and quality, is now in our days used by all sorts of little people; nay the very barefoot friars, that live under vows of humility and mortification, are stung with this itch of title and vainglory. And your ordinary tradesmen, as vintners, tailors, masons, and the like, must be all dressed up forsooth in the right worshipful: whereas your physician does not so much court honour of appellation (though, if it should rain dignities, he might be persuaded happily to venture the wetting) but sits down contentedly with the honour of disposing of your lives and moneys, without troubling himself about any other sort of reputation.”