_ This is the reading of all the editions
before _1669_, and there is no reason to change 'then' to 'there':
'Every man thinks he has come to be a Phoenix (preferring private
judgement to
authority)
and that then comparison ceases, for there
is nothing of the same kind with which to compare himself.
John Donne
Water, as Cozen did the Earth befriend:
Aire for his Kinsman Fire, as firmly deals &c.
Du Bartas, _The second Day of the first Week_
(trans. Joshua Sylvester).
Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part 2, Sect. 2, Mem. 3,
tells how the new Astronomers Tycho, Rotman, Kepler, &c. by their new
doctrine of the heavens are 'exploding in the meantime that element of
fire, those fictitious, first watry movers, those heavens I mean above
the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius and many of
the fathers affirm'. They have abolished, that is to say, the fire
which surrounded the air, as that air surrounded the water and
the earth (all below the moon); and they have also abolished the
Crystalline Sphere and the Primum Mobile which were supposed to
surround the sphere of the fixed stars, or the firmament.
PAGE =238=, l. 215. _Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne are things
forgot._ Donne has probably in mind the effect of the religious wars
in Germany, France, the Low Countries, &c.
l. 217. _that then can be.
_ This is the reading of all the editions
before _1669_, and there is no reason to change 'then' to 'there':
'Every man thinks he has come to be a Phoenix (preferring private
judgement to
authority)
and that then comparison ceases, for there
is nothing of the same kind with which to compare himself.
There is
nothing left to reverence.'
PAGE =239=, l. 258. _It teares
The Firmament in eight and forty sheires._
Norton says that in the catalogue of Hipparchus, preserved in
the Almagest of Ptolemy, the stars were divided into forty-eight
constellations.
l. 260. _New starres._ Norton says: 'It was the apparition of a new
star in 1572, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, that turned Tycho
Brahe to astronomy: and a new bright star in Ophiuchus, in 1604, had
excited general wonder, and afforded Galileo a text for an attack on
the Ptolemaic system'.
At p. 247, l. 70, Donne notes that the 'new starres' went out again.
