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in literature to posterity ought, it seems to me, to carry such conviction as the present plight of the state itself and this prolongation of the days of ruin—days when those are happiest who have reared no children, while those who have lost them in these times are less to be pitied than if they had done so when there was a sound, or indeed any. Republic.

⁴ But if what vexes you is your own private sense of loss, and your mourning is merely caused by the contemplation of what affects yourself, I doubt if your mind can easily be purged of so personal a sorrow altogether; whereas if your anguish is due (as is more consistent with your affectionate nature) to your bewailing the miserable fate of those who have fallen, well, in that case—not to mention what I have so frequently read and heard, that there is no evil in death, and if there be any sensation left after death, it should be rather regarded as deathlessness than death, while, if all sensation be lost, what is not felt cannot properly be deemed misery at all—this I can yet confidently affirm, that such is the chaos, the plotting, and the danger overhanging the state, that the man who has left it all behind him cannot possibly, in my opinion, have misjudged the situation.^[1] For what room is there now, I do not say for a sense of honour, for rectitude, for virtue, for honourable pursuits and liberal accomplishments, but even for any independence and security at all? I solemnly declare that I have not heard of the death of a single young man or boy in the course of this year of gloom and pestilence, but that he seemed to me to have been rescued by the immortal gods from all these miseries and most merciless conditions of life.

⁵ It follows then if you can rid yourself of this one