Meditations IV.6

Given such men, it was in the nature of the case inevitable that their conduct should be of this kind.¹⁸ To wish it otherwise, is to wish that the fig-tree had no acrid juice.¹⁹ As a general conclusion call this to mind, that within a very short time both thou and he will be dead, and a little later not even your names will be left behind you.

• 18.See v. 17.
• 19.xii. 16. Compare Bacon’s essay On Revenge.

  Bacon’s essay, titled “Of Revenge” in his Essays (1625), makes the same comparison: a man who does wrong out of ill nature is “like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other.”