"Nothing is brother to primaeval matter,
'Bout which philosophers their brains may batter
To find it out, but still their hopes they flatter.
"Its virtue is most wondrously display'd,
For in the Bible, we all know, 'tis said,
God out of nothing the creation made.
"Yet nothing has nor head, tail, back, nor shoulder,
And tho' than the great Dixit it is older,
Its strength is such, that all things first shall moulder.
"The rank of nothing we from this may see:
The mighty Roman once declared that he
Caesar or nothing was resolv'd to be."
[But after all, had not Nash more probably in his recollection Sir
Edward Dyer's "Praise of Nothing," a prose tract printed in 1585?]
[119] [See Hazlitt's "Handbook," v. Fleming.]
[120] [Alluding to the "Grobianus et Grobiana" of Dedekindus.]
[121] Ovid's lines are these—
"Discite, qui sapitis, non quae nos scimus inertes,
Sed trepidas acies, et fera castra sequi."
—"Amorum," lib. iii. el. 8.