XXVIII.

Now ev’ry different Sect agrees

Against their common adversary the disease,

And all their little wranglings cease;

The _Pythagoreans_ from their precepts swerve,

No more their silence they observe,

Out of their Schools they run,

Lament, and cry, and groan;

They now desir’d their Metempsychosis;

Not onely do dispute, but wish

That they might turn to beasts, or fowls, or fish.

If the _Platonicks_ had been here,

They would have curs’d their Masters year,

When all things shall be as they were,

When they again the same disease should bear:

And all Philosophers would now,

What the great _Stagyrite_ shall do,

Themselves into the waters head-long throw.

The Plague of Athens, which hapned in the second year of the Peloponnesian Warre First described in Greek by Thucydides; then in Latin by Lucretius. Now attempted in English · 第 32 / 36 题