“Quod petiit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
          AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto.”

     ["That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
     again.  He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
     life.”—­Horace, Ep., i.  I, 98.]

Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted by the breath of occasion.  We never meditate what we would have till the instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature which receives its colour from what it is laid upon.  What we but just now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return again to it; ’tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency: 

“Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum.”

     ["We are turned about like the top with the thong of others.” 
     —­Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]

We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current: 

“Nonne videmus,
Quid sibi quisque velit, nescire, et quaerere semper
Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?”

["Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking
for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen.” 
—­Lucretius, iii. 1070.]

Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.

         “Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
          Juppiter auctificas lustravit lumine terras.”

["Such are the minds of men, that they change as the light with
which father Jupiter himself has illumined the increasing earth.” 
—­Cicero, Frag.  Poet, lib. x.]

We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.  In any one who had prescribed and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his whole life; Empedocles observed this discrepancy in the Agrigentines, that they gave themselves up to delights, as if every day was their last, and built as if they had been to live for ever.  The judgment would not be hard to make, as is very evident in the younger Cato; he who therein has found one step, it will lead him to all the rest; ’tis a harmony of very according sounds, that cannot jar.  But with us ’t is quite contrary; every particular action requires a particular judgment.  The surest way to steer, in my opinion, would be to take our measures from the nearest allied circumstances, without engaging in a longer inquisition, or without concluding any other consequence.  I was told, during the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, that a maid, hard by the place where I then was, had thrown herself out