But he that stealeth shall be found soon.
What child that day born may be
A great lord he shall live to be.
Not alone in Britain, but throughout the world, men have esteemed one day above another. This universal tendency of the human mind is tersely expressed in a translation by Barnaby Googe of some verses accredited to the Bavarian theologian, Thomas Kirchmaier (1511-78), whose literary pseudonym was Naogeorgus:—
And first, betwixt the dayes they make no little difference,
For all be not of vertue like, nor like preheminence,
But some of them Egyptian are and full of jeopardee,
And some againe, beside the rest, both good and luckie bee,
Like difference of the nights they make, as if the Almightie King,
That made them all, not gracious were to them in everything.[415]