🚀 go-pugleaf

rare conjunctions of the heavens; so they
seldom fail in prediction.

174. Misery.--Solomon and Job have best known and best spoken of the misery
of man; the former the most fortunate, and the latter the most unfortunate
of men; the former knowing the vanity of pleasures from experience, the
latter the reality of evils.

175. We know ourselves so little that many think they are about to die when
they are well, and many think they are well when they are near death,
unconscious of approaching fever, or of the abscess ready to form itself.

176. Cromwell was about to ravage all Christendom; the royal family was
undone, and his own for ever established, save for a little grain of sand
which formed in his ureter. Rome herself was trembling under him; but this
small piece of gravel having formed there, he is dead, his family cast down,
all is peaceful, and the king is restored.

177. Three hosts. Would he who had possessed the friendship of the King of
England, the King of Poland, and the Queen of Sweden, have believed he would
lack a refuge and shelter in the world?

178. Macrobius: on the innocents slain by Herod.

179. When Augustus learnt that Herod's own son was amongst the infants under
two years of age, whom he had caused to be slain, he said that it was better
to be Herod's pig than his son. Macrobius, Saturnalia, ii. 4.

180. The great and the humble have the same misfortunes, the same griefs,
the same passions; but the one is at the top of the wheel, and the other
near the centre, and so less disturbed by the same revolutions.

181. We are so unfortunate that we can only take pleasure in a thing on
condition of being annoyed if it turn out ill, as a thousand things can do,
and do every hour. He who should find the secret of rejoicing in the good,
without troubling himself with its contrary evil, would have hit the mark.
It is