Upon the whole matter, I account a
person who has a moderate mind and fortune, and lives in the
conversation of two or three agreeable friends, with little commerce
in the world besides; who is esteemed well enough by his few
neighbours that know him, and is truly irreproachable by anybody;
and so after a healthful quiet life, before the great inconveniences
of old age, goes more silently out of it than he came in (for I
would not have him so much as cry in the exit); this innocent
deceiver of the word, as Horace calls him, this Muta Persona, I take
to have been more happy in his part, than the greatest actors that
fill the stage with show and noise, nay, even than Augustus himself,
who asked with his last breath, whether he had not played his farce
very well.
Seneca, ex Thyeste,
Act 2. Chor.
Stet quicunque volet, potens,
Aulae culmine lubrico; etc.
Upon the slippery tops of human state,
The gilded pinnacles of fate,
Let others proudly stand, and for a while,
The giddy danger to beguile,
With joy and with disdain look down on all,
Till their heads turn, and down they fall.
Me, O ye gods, on earth, or else so near
That I no fall to earth may fear,
And, O ye gods, at a good distance seat
From the long ruins of the great!
Here wrapped in the arms of quiet let me lie,
Quiet, companion of obscurity.
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