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.]

I must be fain for the time to come (for hitherto, thanks be to God, nothing has happened much amiss), whereas others seek time and opportunity to think of what they have to say, to avoid all preparation, for fear of tying myself to some obligation upon which I must insist.  To be tied and bound to a thing puts me quite out, and to depend upon so weak an instrument as my memory.  I never read this following story that I am not offended at it with a personal and natural resentment:  Lyncestes, accused of conspiracy against Alexander, the day that he was brought out before the army, according to the custom, to be heard as to what he could say for himself, had learned a studied speech, of which, hesitating and stammering, he pronounced some words.  Whilst growing more and more perplexed, whilst struggling with his memory, and trying to recollect what he had to say, the soldiers nearest to him charged their pikes against him and killed him, looking upon him as convict; his confusion and silence served them for a confession; for having had so much leisure to prepare himself in prison, they concluded that it was not his memory that failed him, but that his conscience tied up his tongue and stopped his mouth.  And, truly, well said; the place, the assembly, the expectation, astound a man, even when he has but the ambition to speak well; what can a man do when ’tis an harangue upon which his life depends?

For my part, the very being tied to what I am to say is enough to loose me from it.  When I wholly commit and refer myself to my memory, I lay so much stress upon it that it sinks under me:  it grows dismayed with the burden.  So much as I trust to it, so much do I put myself out of my own power, even to the finding it difficult to keep my own countenance; and have been sometimes very much put to it to conceal