impression is much; and the other is, to sever, as much as may be, the construction of the injury from the point of contempt; imputing it to misunderstanding, fear, passion, or what you will.
LVIII.—OF VICISSITUDE OF THINGS.
Solomon saith, “There is no new thing upon the earth;”529 so that as Plato530 had an imagination that all knowledge was but remembrance, so Solomon giveth his sentence, “That all novelty is but oblivion;”531 whereby you may see, that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below. There is an abstruse astrologer that saith, if it were not for two things that are constant (the one is, that the fixed stars ever stand at like distance one from another, and never come nearer together, nor go further asunder; the other, that the diurnal motion perpetually keepeth time), no individual would last one moment; certain it is, that the matter is in a perpetual flux, and never at a stay. The great winding-sheets that bury all things in oblivion, are two,—deluges and earthquakes. As for