I sat leaning on my elbow, and my left hand under my side, devising
what a kind of death it might be to be let blood till a man die. I called
to mind the assertion of some philosophers, who said the soul was
nothing but blood; then thought I what a thing were this, if I should
let my soul fall and break his neck into a basin. I had but a pimple rose
with heat in that part of the vein where they use to prick, and I fearfully
misdeemed it as my soul searching for passage. Fie upon it! A man’s
breath to be let out at a back door, what a villainy it is! To die bleeding
is all one as if a man should die pissing. Good drink makes good blood,
so that piss is nothing but blood under-age. Seneca and Lucan were
lobcocks to choose that death of all other; a pig, or a hog, or any edible
brute beast a cook or a butcher deals upon dies bleeding. To die with
a prick wherewith the faintest-hearted woman under heaven would not
be killed, O God, it is infamous.