Neither have I satisfied myself in this employment; but I have very near arrived at what I expected from my own performance, and have much surpassed what I promised them with whom I had to do:  for I am apt to promise something less than what I am able to do, and than what I hope to make good.  I assure myself that I have left no offence or hatred behind me; to leave regret or desire for me amongst them, I at least know very well that I never much aimed at it: 

              “Mene huic confidere monstro! 
               Mene salis placidi vultum, fluctusque quietos
               Ignorare?”

["Should I place confidence in this monster?  Should I be ignorant
of the dangers of that seeming placid sea, those now quiet waves?”
—­Virgil, Aeneid, V. 849.]

CHAPTER XI

OF CRIPPLES

’Tis now two or three years ago that they made the year ten days shorter in France.—­[By the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.]—­How many changes may we expect should follow this reformation! it was really moving heaven and earth at once.  Yet nothing for all that stirs from its place my neighbours still find their seasons of sowing and reaping, the opportunities of doing their business, the hurtful and propitious days, dust at the same time where they had, time out of mind, assigned them; there was no more error perceived in our old use, than there is amendment found in the alteration; so great an uncertainty there is throughout; so gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception.  ’Tis said that this regulation might have been carried on with less inconvenience, by subtracting for some years, according to the example of Augustus, the Bissextile, which is in some sort a day of impediment and trouble, till we had exactly satisfied this debt, the which itself is not done by this correction, and we yet remain some days in arrear:  and yet, by this means, such order might be taken for the future, arranging that after the revolution of such or such a number of years, the supernumerary day might be always thrown out, so that we could not, henceforward, err above four-and-twenty hours in our computation.  We have no other account of time but years; the world has for many ages made use of that only; and yet it is a measure that to this day we are not agreed upon, and one that we still doubt what form other nations have variously given to it, and what was the true use of it.  What does this saying of some mean, that the heavens in growing old bow themselves down nearer towards us, and put us into an uncertainty even of hours and days? and that which Plutarch says of the months, that astrology had not in his time determined as to the motion of the moon; what a fine condition are we in to keep records of things past.