All over the house big fires were glowing and blazing. Nothing
pleased the marquis worse than the least appearance of stinting
the consumption of coal. In the library two huge gratefuls were
burning from dawn to midnight--well for the books anyhow, if their
owner seldom showed his face amongst them. There were days during
which, except the servant whose duty it was to attend to the fires,
not a creature entered the room but Malcolm. To him it was as the
cave of Aladdin to the worshipper of Mammon, and yet now he would
often sit down indifferent to its hoarded splendours, and gather
no jewels.
But one morning, as he sat there alone, in an oriel looking seawards,
there lay on a table before him a thin folio, containing the chief
works of Sir Thomas Brown--amongst the rest his well known Religio
Medici, from which he had just read the following passage:
"When I take a full view and circle of myself, without this reasonable
moderatour, and equall piece of justice, Death, I doe conceive my
self the most miserablest person extant; were there not another
life that I hoped for, all the vanities of this world should not
intreat a moment's breath from me; could the Devil work my belief
to imagine I could never die, I would not outlive that very thought:
I have so abject a conceit of this common way of existence, this
retaining to the Sun and elements, I cannot think this is to be a
man, or to live according to the dignity of humanity.
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