My opinion is that the greatest pain (I say the greatest, though it may be ten atoms less than another) is not therefore short, because acute.

I could name to you a great many good men who have been tormented many years with the acutest pains of the gout.

But this cautious man doth not determine the measure of that greatness or of duration, so as to enable us to know what he calls excessive with regard to pain, or short with respect to its continuance.

Let us pass him by, then, as one who says just nothing at all; and let us force him to acknowledge, notwithstanding he might behave himself somewhat boldly under his colic and his strangury, that no remedy against pain can be had from him who looks on pain as the greatest of all evils.

We must apply, then, for relief elsewhere, and nowhere better (if we seek for what is most consistent with itself) than to those who place the chief good in honesty, and the greatest evil in infamy.