The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII, page 79 by Francis W. Halsey
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y man, till he has first been seen to play the last, and doubtless the hardest act of his part, because there may be disguise and dissimulation in all the rest, where these fine philosophical discourses are only put on; and where accidents do not touch us to the quick, they give us leisure to maintain the same sober gravity; but in this last scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting; we must speak plain, and must discover what there is of pure and clean in the bottom.
Nam veræ voces tum demum pectore ab imo Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona manet res.
--Lucret., l. 3.
"Then that at last truth issues from the heart. The vizor's gone, we act our own true part."
Wherefore at this last all the other actions of our life ought to be try'd and sifted. 'Tis the master-day, 'tis the day that is judge of all the rest, 'tis the day (says one of the ancients) that ought to judge of all my foregoing years. To death do I refer the essay of the fruit of all my studies. We shall then see whether my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart. I have seen many by their death give a good or an ill repute to their whole life. Scipio, the father-in-law of Pompey the Great, in dying well, wip'd away the ill opinion that till then every one had conceived of him. Epaminondas being ask'd which of the three he had in the greatest esteem, Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself; "You must first see us die (said he) before that question can be resolv'd": and, in truth, he would infinitely wrong that great man, who would weigh him without the honor and grandeur of his end.
God Almightly had order'd all things as it has best pleased Him; but I have in my time seen three of the most execrable persons that ever I knew in all manners of abominable living, and the most infamous to boot, who all dy'd a very regular death, and in all circumstances compos'd even to perfection. There are brave, and fortunate deaths. I have seen death cut the thread of the progress of a prodigious advanc