To place 'he was' at the end of the line was in the circumstances to court ambiguity, and is not metrically requisite. In the second place, the rhetorical question asked requires an answer, and that is given most clearly by the punctuation of _1633_. 'How little more, alas, is man now than [he was] before he was? He was nothing; and as for us, we are fit for nothing. Chance or ourselves still throw us out of gear with everything.' To be nothing and to be fit for nothing--there is all the difference. In the _1669_ version it is not easy to see the relevance of the rhetorical question and of the line which follows: 'Nothing for us, we are for nothing fit.' This seems to introduce a new thought, a fresh antithesis. It is not quite true. A breeze would fit them very well. The use of 'for' in 'for us', as I have taken it, is quite idiomatic: For me, I am the mistress of my fate. Shakespeare, _Rape of Lucrece_, 1021. For the rest o' the fleet, they all have met again. Id., _The Tempest_, I. i. 232. PAGE =180=. TO S^r HENRY WOTTON. The occasion of this letter was apparently (see my article, _Bacon's Poem, The World: Its Date And Relation to Certain Other Poems_: _Mod. Lang. Rev._, April, 1911) a literary _débat_ among some of the wits of Essex's circle. The subject of the _débat_ was 'Which kind of life is best, that of Court, Country, or City?' and the suggestion came from the two epigrams in the Greek Anthology attributed to Posidippus and Metrodorus respectively. In the first ([Greek: Poiên tis biotoio tamê tribon?]) each kind of life in turn is condemned; in the second each is defended. These epigrams were paraphrased in _Tottel's Miscellany_ (1557) by Nicholas Grimald, and again in the _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), attributed to George Puttenham. Stimulated perhaps by the latter version, in which the Court first appears as one of the principal spheres of life, or by Ronsard's French version in which also the 'cours des Roys', unknown to the Greek poet, are introduced, Bacon wrote his well-known paraphrase: The world's a bubble: and the life of man Less than a span. It is just possible too that he wrote a paraphrase, similar in verse, of the second epigram, which I have printed in the article referred to. A copy of _The World_ was found among Wotton's papers and was printed in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_ (1651) signed 'Fra. Lord Bacon'. It had already been published by Thomas Farnaby in his _Florilegium Epigrammatum Graecorum &c._ (1629). Bacon probably gave Wotton a copy and he appears to have shown it to his friends. Among these was Thomas Bastard, who, to judge by the numerous epigrams he addressed to Essex, belonged to the same circle as Bacon, Donne, and Wotton,--if we may so describe it, but probably every young man of letters looked to Essex for patronage. Bastard's poem runs: Ad Henricum Wottonum.