contempt. And the two remedies are by the
contraries. The former to take good times, when first to relate to a man
an angry business; for the first impression is much; and the other is,
to sever, as much as may be, the construction of the injury from the
point of contempt; imputing it to misunderstanding, fear, passion, or
what you will.

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 astrologer that saith, If it were not for two
things that are constant (the one is, that the fixed stars ever stand a
like distance one from 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. Certain 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 earthquakes. 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 in the time of Elias, was but particular, and left
people alive. As for the great burnings by lightnings, which are
often in the West Indies, they are but narrow. But in the other two
destructions, by deluge and earthquake, it is further to be noted, that
the remnant of people which hap to be reserved, are commonly ignorant
and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past; so
that the oblivion is all one, as if none had been left. If you consider
well of the people of the West Indies, it is very probable that they are
a newer or a younger people, than the people of the Old World. And it is
much more likely, that the destruction that hath heretofore been there,
was not by earthquakes (as the Egyptian priest told Solon concerning the
island of Atlantis, that it was swallowed by an earthquake), but rather
that it was desolated by a particular deluge. For earthquakes are seldom
in those parts. But on the other side, they have such pouring rivers, as
the rivers of Asia and Africk and Europe, are but brooks to them.
Their Andes, likewise, or mountains, are far higher than those with us;
whereby it seems, that the remnants of generation of