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.