Life & Mortality Quote by William Lilly

Comfort arrives as a moral punchline here: a man dies, and the survivor reports it the way someone might review an inn. William Lilly delivers the line with a chilly, almost domesticated pragmatism that makes it sting. The sentence is built like a confession that refuses to feel guilty. "Most comfortably" is the key phrase, a soft cushion laid over death; it implies that comfort is not just physical but social, even existential. Lilly is telling you what improved, not what was lost.

The subtext is about dependency and the brutal economics of household life. "Mistress" and "master" mark him as a servant (or at least a dependent) in a world where affection from the powerful is a kind of currency. When the mistress dies, the household hierarchy reshuffles; Lilly's position apparently rises because the master now directs attention - and resources - toward him. That "great affection" reads less like romance than patronage: protection, proximity, perhaps money, perhaps simply not being cast out. In an era when losing a place in a household could mean genuine precarity, comfort is a survival metric.

Calling Lilly a "celebrity" fits, too. As an astrologer with a public profile, he knew how to narrate himself for an audience that appreciated candor salted with self-interest. The line works because it refuses modern sentiments about mourning and instead exposes the older truth: death rearranges power, and some people land on the right side of the rearrangement.