So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon, This chaos, when degree is suffocate, Follows the choking. And this neglection of degree it is That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose It hath to climb. The general’s disdain’d By him one step below; he, by the next; That next by him beneath: so every step, Exampled by the first pace that is sick Of his superior, grows to an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation: And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot, Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length, Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.” At a hasty glance the two passages may appear to have little more connection than that of similarity of subject, leading to several coincidences of expression; but the Emblem of Chaos, given by Whitney, represents the winds, the waters, the stars of heaven, all in confusion mingling, and certainly is very suggestive of the exact words which the dramatic poet uses,— “What raging of the sea? shaking of earth? Commotion in the winds? . . . . . . The bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe.” Discord as one of the great causes of confusion is also spoken of with much force (_1 Henry VI_., act iv. sc. 1, l. 188, vol. v. p. 68),— “No simple man that sees This jarring discord of nobility, This should’ring of each other in the court, This factious bandying of their favourites, But that he doth presage some ill event. ’Tis much, when sceptres are in children’s hands; But more when envy breeds unkind division; There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.” The Paris edition of Horapollo’s _Hieroglyphics_, 1551, subjoins several to which there is no Greek text (pp. 217–223). Among them (at p. 219) is one that figures, _The thread of life_, a common poetic idea. [Illustration: _Horapollo, ed. 1551._] Quo pacto mortem ſeu hominis exitum. Hominis exitum innuentes, fuſum pingebant, & fili extremum reſectum, quaſi à colo diuulſum, finguntur ſiquidem à poetis Parcæ hominis vitam nere: Clotho quidem colum geſtans: Lacheſis quæ Sors exponitur, nens: Atropos verò inconuertibilis ſeu inexorabilis Latinè redditur, filum abrumpens.