[Footnote 125:  Galileo.] [Footnote 126:  A hill near Florence.]

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[127]

  Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
    Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
    Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
    When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
  Forget not:  in thy book record their groans
    Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
    Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
    Mother with infant down the rocks.  Their moans
  The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
    To heaven.  Their martyred blood and ashes sow
    O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
  The triple Tyrant,[128] that from these may grow
    A hundred-fold, who, having learnt thy way,
     Early may fly the Babylonian woe.[129]

[Footnote 127:  This sonnet refers to the persecution instituted in 1655 by the Duke of Savoy against the Vaudois Protestants.] [Footnote 128:  The Pope, who wore the triple crown or tiara.] [Footnote 129:  The Papacy, with which the Protestant reformers identified Babylon the Great, the “Scarlet Woman” of Revelation.]

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

THE VANITY OF MONUMENTS.

[From Urn Burial]

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.  Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks....The iniquity[130] of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.  Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids?  Herostratus lives, that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it.  Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself.  In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations and Thersites[131] is like to live as long as Agamemnon.  Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?  Without the favor of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methusaleh’s long life had been his only chronicle.

Oblivion is not to be hired.[132] The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man.  Twenty-seven names make up the first story, and the reported names ever since contain not one living century.  The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.  The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox?  Every