and these:--

But from our lips the vital spirit fled
Returns no more to wake the silent dead.
("Iliad," ix. 408.)

Wherefore they must needs cut the very throats of them that shall
with Epicurus tell them, We men were born once for all, and we
cannot be born twice, but our not being must last forever.
For this will bring them to slight their present good as little, or
rather indeed as nothing at all compared with everlastingness, and
therefore to let it pass unenjoyed and to become wholly negligent
of virtue and action, as men disheartened and brought to a contempt
of themselves, as being but as it were of one day's continuance and
uncertain, and born for no considerable purpose. For insensibility,
dissolution, and the conceit that what hath no sense is nothing to
us, do not at all abate the fear of death, but rather help to
confirm it; for this very thing is it that nature most dreads,--


But may you all return to mould and wet,
(Ibid. vii. 99.)

to wit, the dissolution of the soul into what is without knowledge
or sense. Now, while Epicurus would have this to be a separation
into atoms and void, he doth but further cut off all hope of
immortality; to compass which (I can scarce refrain from saying)
all men and women would be well contented to be worried by
Cerberus, and to carry water into the tub full of holes, so they
might but continue in being and not be exterminated. Though (as I