Julius Scaliger, who in a sleepless fit of the gout could
make two hundred verses in a night, would have but
five* plain words upon his tomb. And this serious per-
son, though no minor wit, left the poetry of his epitaph
unto others; either unwilling to commend himself, or
to be judged by a distich, and perhaps considering how
unhappy great poets have been in versifying their own
epitaphs; wherein Petrarch, Dante, and Ariosto, have
so unhappily failed, that if their tombs should outlast
their works, posterity would find so little of Apollo on
them as to mistake them for Ciceronian poets.
In this deliberate and creeping progress unto the
grave, he was somewhat too young and of too noble a
mind, to fall upon that stupid symptom observable in
divers persons near their journey's end, and which may
be reckoned among the mortal symptoms of their last
disease; that is, to become more narrow-minded, miser-
able, and tenacious, unready to part with anything,
when they are ready to part with all, and afraid to want
when they have no time to spend; meanwhile physi-
cians, who know that many are mad but in a single
depraved imagination, and one prevalent decipiency;
and that beside and out of such single deliriums a man
may meet with sober actions and good sense in bedlam;
* Julii Caesaris Scaligeri quod fuit.
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