Read "Table-Talk" by William Hazlitt online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"And our little life is rounded with a sleep. "
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern -- why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom?