Gibbon has preserved. "Yesterday, as from an eminence I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under my feet; and I said in my heart, 'Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors.' These armies are no longer mine; and in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an assassin." The inscription on his tomb invited those who had seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, to meditate on its present burial in the dust.

Michelet moralises with trenchant irony on the fate which overtook our Henry V. on French soil. It is to the "Dance of Death" he refers in the exclamation, "What sport for death, what a malicious pastime to have brought the victorious Harry within a month's reach of the crown of France! After a life of unremitting toil for that end, he wanted but one little month added to his existence to be the survivor of Charles VI. .. No! not a month, not a day more was to be his." Splendid was that festival at Cæsarea at which Herod Agrippa, in the pomp and pride of power, entered the theatre in a robe of silver, which glittered, says the historian, with the morning rays of the sun, so as to dazzle the eyes of the assembly, and excite general admiration. Some of his flatterers set up the shout, "A present god!" Agrippa did not repress the impious adulation which spread through the theatre. At that moment he looked up, and saw an owl perched over his head on a rope, and Agrippa had been forewarned that when next he saw that bird, "at the height of his fortune," he would die within five days. The fatal omen, according to Josephus, pierced the heart of the king, who, with deep melancholy, exclaimed, "Your god will soon suffer the common lot of mortality." He was immediately struck, in the language of the sacred volume, by an angel. Seized with violent pains, he was carried to his palace, lingered five days in extreme agony, being "eaten of worms," and so died.

Fielding forcibly presents a certain sanguine projector, lusty and strong, in the heyday of middle age, who reckons con

fidently on becoming heir to the estate of a senior of immense. wealth, and has all his plans elaborately prepared for his disposal of the same. Nothing is wanting to enable him to enter upon the immediate execution of these plans, but the death of the elder man, in calculating which he has studied every book extant that treats of the value of lives, reversions, etc.; from all which he has satisfied himself, that as he has every day a chance of this happening, so has he more an even chance of its happening before long. "But while the captain was one day busied in deep contemplations of this kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as most unseasonable, accidents happened to him. The utmost malice of fortune could, indeed, have contrived nothing so cruel, so mal-à-propos, so absolutely destructive to all his schemes." It was, that just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by the other's death, he himself was cut off by an apoplexy. As Léontine complains in "Heraclius,"

"Et lorsque le hasard me flatte avec excès,

Tout mon dessein avorte au milieu du succès."

It was just when Kleber was beginning to reap the fruits of his intrepidity and discretion, that he was cut off by the obscure assassin, Souliman. One is reminded of Thomson on the

massacre of the bees,

"At evening snatched,

Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night,

And fixed o'er sulphur; while not dreaming ill,

The happy people in their waxen cells,

Sat tending public cares, and planning schemes
Of temperance, for winter poor," etc.

A tory historian, recording the close of the parliamentary session in July 1827, takes occasion to observe that Mr. Canning now saw every wish of his heart gratified, having raised himself to the highest position in the State, and being looked up to in every part of the world as the protector of the oppressed and the advocate of freedom. In the prime of life, "his sway in Parliament was unbounded, and he might hope

for a long career of fame, fortune, and usefulness." Vanitas
vanitatum! The hand of fate was already upon him, and he
was to be suddenly snatched from the scene of his glory, at the
very moment when he seemed to have attained the summit of
earthly felicity. Even, however, when death is not concerned,
as in his memorable case, in the sudden and final collapse of a
great career, and the abrupt extinction of exuberant promise,
how often is Cowper's picture realized, where—

"Runs the mountainous and craggy ridge
That tempts ambition. On the summit, see,
The seals of office glitter in his eyes;

He climbs, he pants, he grasps them. At his heels,
Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends,

And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down,
And wins them, but to lose them in his turn."

The picture is, in some sort, and for moral uses, a pendent to that by another poet, of those who are pushing hard up hill the cumbrous load of life; just as they trust to gain the farthest steep, and put an end to strife,

"Down thunders back the stone with mighty sweep,

And hurls their labours to the valley deep,

For ever vain."

But this is diverging farther and farther from the direct import of our theme. More to the purpose is the same poet's description of Celadon assuring his betrothed of perfect safety, and triumphantly asserting her absolute immunity from the perils of the storm, and as exultingly inferring his own, from his relationship to her; when,

"From his void embrace,

Mysterious heaven! that moment to the ground,

A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid."

Some innocents, as Cleopatra has it, escape not the thunderbolt. Innocence, as well as iniquity, may know something of that breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.

The loving friends of Charlotte Brontè, after her marriage, are described by one among them as catching occasional

of

glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs sound, telling to them who stood outside, of the gladness within; and they said among themselves, "After a long and a hard struggle-after many cares and bitter sorrows-she is tasting happiness now." Remembering her trials, they were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. "But God's ways are not as our ways,” Mrs. Gaskell adds. Just as Currer Bell's happiness seemed beginning, and her goodness ripening, came fever, delirium, death. Mrs. Gaskell's own career was similarly cut short, just when she was finishing, but ere yet she had finished, the completest and ablest of her works; just when public recognition of her merits was growing earnest as well as general. It is the old, old story. For what, as the old ballad says,—

WA

that Babylon of which the foundations, indeed, had been laid ages ago, but which he had so enlarged and adorned as to make it one of the world's wonders-Nebuchadnezzar the king, elate with pride at the pomp of architectural results, flushed with the triumph of enterprises so costly, and achievements so manifest to the eye, gave utterance, in complacent soliloquy perhaps, to the exultant sense of being a master builder indeed, and of seeing his power reflected in so gorgeous a form. The king spake and said, "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty ?"

While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice.

from heaven, saying, "O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee." And the sequel we know. How that same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws,-is it not written in the book of the prophecies of Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, and whom the king made ruler over the whole province of that same Babylon the Great?

The royal builder's boast was on the instant reproved by a degradation literally brutal in its extremity. While the word of complacent self-glorification was in the king's mouth, the sentence of bestial doom went forth against him. Just when he was resting on his laurels, a taint overtook them. Just when he rejoiced in asserting himself a king of kings, commenced the working of a curse which levelled him with grazing flocks and herds.

The lesson is for all time, and for all sorts and conditions of men. Verifications of it-varying, of course, in kind, and still more in degree-are rife in records historical and biographical, and in the unrecorded experiences, the moving accidents, of everyday life. Just when a man is apt to set up his rest, the fiat goes forth against him which shatters to its base the structure he has reared. The house he has just finished building tumbles to pieces like a house of cards. The castle in whose defences, at last completed, he felt so secure, dislimns like a castle in the air.

The engineer

Who lays the last stone of his sea-built tower,
It cost him years and years of toil to raise,-
And, smiling at it, tells the wind and waves
To roar and whistle now-but, in a night,
Beholds the tempest sporting in its place—
May look aghast."

Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand, and displayed the golden vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out