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.]

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