OF VICISSITUDE OF THINGS.             295
 

LVIIL

OF VICISSITUDE OF THINGS.

Solomon saith: ** There is no new thing upon the
earth;" so that as Plato had an imagination that all
knowledge was but remembrance, so Solomon giveth
his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion, whereby
you may see that the river of Lethe runneth as well
above ground as below. There is an abstruse astro¬
loger that saith : " If it were not for two things that
are constant (the one is, that the fixed stars ever
stand at like distance from one 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." Cer¬
tain 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 earth¬
quakes. As for conflagrations and great droughts,
they do not merely dispeople and destroy. Phaeton's
car went but a day ; and the  three  years'  drought