“Et sua sunt illis incommoda; parque per omnes
          Tempestas.”

["They all share in the mischief; the tempest rages
everywhere.”—­AEneid, ii.]

Astrologers may very well, as they do, warn us of great revolutions and imminent mutations:  their prophecies are present and palpable, they need not go to heaven to foretell this.  There is not only consolation to be extracted from this universal combination of ills and menaces, but, moreover, some hopes of the continuation of our state, forasmuch as, naturally, nothing falls where all falls:  universal sickness is particular health:  conformity is antagonistic to dissolution.  For my part, I despair not, and fancy that I discover ways to save us: 

                   “Deus haec fortasse benigna
                    Reducet in sedem vice.”

["The deity will perchance by a favourable turn restore us to our
former position.”—­Horace, Epod., xiii. 7.]

Who knows but that God will have it happen, as in human bodies that purge and restore themselves to a better state by long and grievous maladies, which render them more entire and perfect health than that they took from them?  That which weighs the most with me is, that in reckoning the symptoms of our ill, I see as many natural ones, and that Heaven sends us, and properly its own, as of those that our disorder and human imprudence contribute to it.  The very stars seem to declare that we have already continued long enough, and beyond the ordinary term.  This also afflicts me, that the mischief which nearest threatens us, is not an alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and divulsion, which is the most extreme of our fears.

I, moreover, fear, in these fantasies of mine, the treachery of my memory, lest, by inadvertence, it should make me write the same thing twice.  I hate to examine myself, and never review, but very unwillingly, what has once escaped my pen.  I here set down nothing new.  These are common thoughts, and having, peradventure, conceived them an hundred times, I am afraid I have set them down somewhere else already.  Repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in Homer; but ’tis ruinous in things that have only a superficial and transitory show.  I do not love over-insisting, even in the most profitable things, as in Seneca; and the usage of his stoical school displeases me, to repeat, upon every subject, at full length and width the principles and presuppositions that serve in general, and always to realledge anew common and universal reasons.

My memory grows cruelly worse every day: 

                   “Pocula Lethaeos ut si ducentia somnos,
                    Arente fauce traxerim;”

["As if my dry throat had drunk seducing cups of Lethaean
oblivion.”—­Horace, Epod., xiv. 3.]