disturbed; and their first oppressing and pestering of others gave
them occasion to expect to suffer ill themselves. Why should a man
recount the outrages of rabbles, the barbarities of thieves, or the
villanies of inheritors, or yet the contagions of airs and the
concursions of seas, by which Epicurus (as himself writeth) was in
his voyage to Lampsacus within very little of drowning? The very
composition of the body--it containing in it the matter of all
diseases, and (to use a pleasantry of the vulgar) cutting thongs
for the beast out of its own hide, I mean pains out of the body--is
sufficient to make life perilous and uneasy, and that to the good
as well as to the bad, if they have learned to set their
complacence and assurance in the body and the hopes they have of
it, and in nothing else; as Epicurus hath written, as well in many
other of his discourses as in that of Man's End.

They therefore assign not only a treacherous and unsure ground of
their pleasurable living, but also one in all respects despicable
and little, if the escaping of evils be the matter of their
complacence and last good. But now they tell us, nothing else can
be so much as imagined, and nature hath no other place to bestow
her good in but only that out of which her evil hath been driven;
as Metrodorus speaks in his book against the Sophists. So that
this single thing, to escape evil, he says, is the supreme good;
for there is no room to lodge this good in where no more of what is
painful and afflicting goes out. Like unto this is that of
Epicurus, where he saith: The very essence of good arises from the
escaping of bad, and a man's recollecting, considering, and
rejoicing within himself that this hath befallen him. For what
occasions transcending joy (he saith) is some great impending evil
escaped; and in this lies the very nature and essence of good, if a