IV. I continue my course by actions according to nature, until I
fall and cease, breathing out my last breath into that air, by which
continually breathed in I did live; and falling upon that earth, out of
whose gifts and fruits my father gathered his seed, my mother her
blood, and my nurse her milk, out of which for so many years I have
been provided, both of meat and drink. And lastly, which beareth me that
tread upon it, and beareth with me that so many ways do abuse it, or
so freely make use of it, so many ways to so many ends.
V. No man can admire thee for thy sharp acute language, such is thy
natural disability that way. Be it so: yet there be many other good
things, for the want of which thou canst not plead the want or natural
ability. Let them be seen in thee, which depend wholly from thee;
sincerity, gravity, laboriousness, contempt of pleasures; be not
querulous, be Content with little, be kind, be free; avoid all
superfluity, all vain prattling; be magnanimous. Doest not thou
perceive, how many things there be, which notwithstanding any pretence
of natural indisposition and unfitness, thou mightest have performed and
exhibited, and yet still thou doest voluntarily continue drooping
downwards? Or wilt thou say that it is through defect of thy natural
constitution, that thou art constrained to murmur, to be base and
wretched to flatter; now to accuse, and now to please, and pacify thy
body: to be vainglorious, to be so giddy-headed., and unsettled in thy
thoughts? nay (witnesses be the Gods) of all these thou mightest have
been rid long ago: only, this thou must have been contented with, to
have borne the blame of one that is somewhat slow and dull, wherein thou
must so exercise thyself, as one who neither doth much take to heart
this his natural defect, nor yet pleaseth himself in it.