out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment.
Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right lined circle[A 1] must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years.[A 2] Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter,[A 3] to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets or first letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have new names given us like many of the mummies[A 4] are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages.
To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan;[A 5] disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself. Who cares to subsist like Hippocrates's patients, or Achilles's horses in Homer, under naked nominations, without deserts and noble acts,
- ↑ The character of death.
- ↑ Old ones being taken up, and other bodies laid under them.
- ↑ Gruteri Inscriptiones Antiquæ.
- ↑ Which men show in several countries, giving them what names they please; and unto some the names of the old Egyptian kings, oul of Herodotus.
- ↑ Cuperem notum esse quod sim, non opto ut sciatur qualis sim. Card. invita propria.
