I THE BUCENTAUR CEREMONY IN VENICE[64]

These wishes come to you from Venice, a place where there is nothing wanting that heart can wish; renowned Venice, the admired'st city in the world, a city that all Europe is bound unto, for she is her greatest rampart against that huge eastern tyrant, the Turk, by sea; else, I believe, he had overrun all Christendom by this time. Against him this city hath performed notable exploits, and not only against him, but divers others: she hath restored emperors to their thrones, and popes to their chairs, and with her galleys often preserved St. Peter's bark from sinking: for which, by way of reward, one of his successors espoused her to the sea, which marriage is solemnly renewed every year in solemn procession by the Doge and all the Clarissimos, and a gold ring cast into the sea out of the great galeasse, called the Bucentoro,[65] wherein the first ceremony was performed by the pope himself, above three hundred years since, and they say it is the self-same vessel still, tho often put upon the careen and trimmed. This made me think of that famous ship at Athens; nay, I fell upon an abstracted notion in philosophy, and a speculation touching the body of men, which being in perpetual flux, and a kind of succession of decays, and consequently requiring, ever and anon, a restoration of what it loseth of the virtue of the former aliment, and what was converted after the third concoction into a blood and fleshy substance, which, as in all other sublunary bodies that have internal principles of heat, useth to transpire, breathe out, and waste away through invisible pores, by exercise, motion, and sleep, to make room still for a supply of new nurriture: I fell, I say, to consider whether our bodies may be said to be of like condition with this Bucentoro, which, tho it be reputed still the same vessel, yet I believe there's not a foot of that timber remaining which it had upon the first dock, having been, as they tell me, so often planked and ribbed, caulked and pieced.

In like manner, our bodies may be said to be daily repaired by new sustenance, which begets new blood, and consequently new spirits, new humors, and, I may say, new flesh; the old, by continual deperdition and insensible perspirations, evaporating still out of us, and giving way to fresh; so that I make a question whether, by reason of these perpetual reparations and accretions, the body of man may be said to be the same numerical body in his old age that he had in his manhood, or the same in his manhood that he had in his youth, the same in his youth that he carried about with him in his childhood, or the same in his childhood which he wore first in the womb. I make a doubt whether I had the same identical, individually numerical body, when I carried a calf-leather satchel to school in Hereford, as when I wore a lambskin hood in Oxford; or whether I have the same mass of blood in my veins, and the same flesh, now in Venice, which I carried about me three years since, up and down London streets, having, in lieu of beer and ale, drunk wine all this while, and fed upon different viands. Now, the stomach is like a crucible, for it hath a chemical kind of virtue to transmute one body into another, to transsubstantiate fish and fruits into flesh within and about us; but tho it be questionable whether I wear the same flesh which is fluxible, I am sure my hair is not the same, for you may remember I went flaxen-haired out of England, but you shall find me returned with a very dark brown, which I impute not only to the heat and air of those hot countries I have eat my bread in, but to the quality and difference of food: you will say that hair is but an excrementitious thing, and makes not to this purpose; moreover, methinks I hear thee say that this may be true only in the blood and spirits, or such fluid parts, not in the solid and heterogeneal parts.

But I will press no further at this time this philosophical notion, which the sight of Bucentoro infused into me, for it hath already made me exceed the bounds of a letter, and, I fear me, to trespass too much upon your patience; I leave the further disquisition of this point to your own contemplations, who are a far riper philosopher than I, and have waded deeper into and drunk more of Aristotle's well. But to conclude, tho it be doubtful whether I carry about me the same body or no in all points that I had in England, I am well assured I bear still the same mind, and therein I verify the old verse:

For, what alterations soever happen in this microcosm, in this little world, this small bulk and body of mine, you may be confident that nothing shall alter my affections, specially towards you, but that I will persevere still the same—the very same.