Hethus followed, over a wider range of data than any one man couldhope to use fully, the advice that he sometimes gave in reviews,that a historian should work fully through the background material.
Frederic L. Paxson frequently advised that a historian should work fully through the background material.
sea-discoverers to new worlds
The imagery of exploration and sea travel was a popular subject in the literature of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era. It was the Age of Discovery, and John Donne himself also had experience in sea travel. The heroic adventure stories of the people who fulfilled the Renaissance curiosity through their expedition were fascinating enough to stir the imagination of the writers of the time.
Exploration is a process of understanding a wider world, but Speaker is no more interested in it since he has already found the perfect world in his little room with his lover.
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally
In Galen's medicine, disease and death were the consequence of a disproportion in one's constituent elements, the 4 humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.
maps
chart of the heavens
In addition to sea and land exploration, astronomy was another interest of the intellectual of Donne's Era.
Source: Redpath, The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (1956)
Seven Sleepers’ den
It's an allusion to a Christian legend about seven Christian youths who hid in a cave in hopes of avoiding the persecution of Decius in AD 249 in Ephesus. Eventually, they were caught, tortured and were walled up alive in the cave they once hid. However, miraculously, they did not die, slept for 187 years and were awaken in AD 479, a new world where Christianity became the major religion.
Same imagery with the poem of waking up in a new world.
Source : https://catholicsaints.info/seven-sleepers-of-ephesus/
sucked on country pleasures
In the 17th century, it was common to send infants of affluent families to the countryside to be wet-nursed. It is an unneglectable process necessary for the infant's growth, but also a sign of immaturity that the babies should once graduate to proceed to the next step of development.
Rustic and simple-minded pleasure compared to the ones enjoyed in the Court or City (probably London where John wrote many of his love poems in Lincoln's Inn).
The Storming of Seringapatam (1799)
This battle, while less familiar to us, would have been familiar to Collins's original readers. Read more about it at the Wikipedia article, Siege of Seringapatam
The treatment of quarantine reflects the latter. Courts and academics rarely expressed doubt about the validity of quarantine regulations, since the courts presumed that actions taken under the police power were constitutional.10,11 Challenges to the Fourteenth Amendment, usually successful when governmental intervention interfered with individual liberties, were not well received by the courts when communicable disease regulations, including quarantine, were involved.
State police power was validated for the first time a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War, when Philadelphia was isolated to control the threat of yellow fever.
quarantine was already a well established form of public health regulation, and was considered proper exercise of the police power of the states; the Supreme Court, in its affirmation of this power, noted that the state had the power to quarantine “to provide for the health of the citizens.”10,11 The uncontrollable nature of epidemic diseases moved the Supreme Court to uphold such extreme measures on the basis of the defense of the common good.8
This is hardly less arbitrarily unjust or patriarchal than the actualsystem of patrilineal inheritance consolidated in the eighteenth century, formingthe backbone of the British economy and its law, and providing the historicalbackground to Jane Austen’s novels
The connection between the unfair genealogical model of literary and artistic inheritance and patrilineal inheritance laws is interesting here, as several of Jane Austen's novels, especially Sense and Sensibility, are shaped by the deleterious effects of this system upon their characters.