The Essays, vol 16 | Page 5

it and foresees it: foresight is
equally convenient in what concerns us, whether good or ill. To
consider and judge of danger is, in some sort, the reverse to being
astounded. I do not find myself strong enough to sustain the force and
impetuosity of this passion of fear, nor of any other vehement passion
whatever: if I was once conquered and beaten down by it, I should
never rise again very sound. Whoever should once make my soul lose
her footing, would never set her upright again: she retastes and
researches herself too profoundly, and too much to the quick, and
therefore would never let the wound she had received heal and cicatrise.
It has been well for me that no sickness has yet discomposed her: at
every charge made upon me, I preserve my utmost opposition and
defence; by which means the first that should rout me would keep me
from ever rallying again. I have no after- game to play: on which side
soever the inundation breaks my banks, I lie open, and am drowned
without remedy. Epicurus says, that a wise man can never become a
fool; I have an opinion reverse to this sentence, which is, that he who
has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise. God grants me
cold according to my cloth, and passions proportionable to the means I
have to withstand them: nature having laid me open on the one side,
has covered me on the other; having disarmed me of strength, she has
armed me with insensibility and an apprehension that is regular, or, if
you will, dull.
I cannot now long endure (and when I was young could much less)
either coach, litter, or boat, and hate all other riding but on horseback,

both in town and country. But I can bear a litter worse than a coach;
and, by the same reason, a rough agitation upon the water, whence fear
is produced, better than the motions of a calm. At the little jerks of oars,
stealing the vessel from under us, I find, I know not how, both my head
and my stomach disordered; neither-can I endure to sit upon a tottering
chair. When the sail or the current carries us equally, or that we are
towed, the equal agitation does not disturb me at all; 'tis an interrupted
motion that offends me, and most of all when most slow: I cannot
otherwise express it. The physicians have ordered me to squeeze and
gird myself about the bottom of the belly with a napkin to remedy this
evil; which however I have not tried, being accustomed to wrestle with
my own defects, and overcome them myself.
Would my memory serve me, I should not think my time ill spent in
setting down here the infinite variety that history presents us of the use
of chariots in the service of war: various, according to the nations and
according to the age; in my opinion, of great necessity and effect; so
that it is a wonder that we have lost all knowledge of them. I will only
say this, that very lately, in our fathers' time, the Hungarians made very
advantageous use of them against the Turks; having in every one of
them a targetter and a musketeer, and a number of harquebuses piled
ready and loaded, and all covered with a pavesade like a
galliot--[Canvas spread along the side of a ship of war, in action to
screen the movements of those on board.]--They formed the front of
their battle with three thousand such coaches, and after the cannon had
played, made them all pour in their shot upon the enemy, who had to
swallow that volley before they tasted of the rest, which was no little
advance; and that done, these chariots charged into their squadrons to
break them and open a way for the rest; besides the use they might
make of them to flank the soldiers in a place of danger when marching
to the field, or to cover a post, and fortify it in haste. In my time, a
gentleman on one of our frontiers, unwieldy of body, and finding no
horse able to carry his weight, having a quarrel, rode through the
country in a chariot of this fashion, and found great convenience in it.
But let us leave these chariots of war.
As if their effeminacy--[Which Cotton translates: "as if the

insignificancy of coaches." ]--had not been sufficiently known by better
proofs, the last kings of our first race travelled in a chariot drawn by
four oxen. Marc Antony was the first at Rome who caused himself to
be drawn in a coach by lions, and a singing wench with him.
[Cytheris, the Roman courtezan.--Plutarch's Life of Antony, c. 3. This,