It is edifying to read in the Diary of Mr. Pepys how, one July afternoon, soon after the king had come back to enjoy his own again, that gentleman went upon the river, but had to put ashore and shelter himself from the rain that rained so hard; during which time came by the king in his barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the queen: "But methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain."

Instructive, too, is the tenor of the legend of King Robert of Sicily, which has been so attractively treated in prose by Leigh Hunt, in his Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and in verse by Professor Longfellow, in his Tales of a Wayside Inn. There we read how the king with his nobles proudly sat at vespers, on St. John's Eve, and heard the priests chant the Magnificat :

"And, as he listened, o'er and o'er again
Repeated, like a burden or refrain,

He caught the words, 'Deposuit potentes
De sede, et exaltavit humiles ;'

And slowly lifting up his kingly head,

He to a learned clerk beside him said,

'What mean these words?' The clerk made answer meet,

'He hath put down the mighty from their seat,

And hath exalted them of low degree.'

Thereat King Robert muttered scornfully,

"Tis well that such seditious words are sung

Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue;

For unto priests and people be it known

There is no power can push me from my throne!""

The sequel teaches him a different lesson, which he learns by (and lays to) heart.

In those days, however, if any order of men might, or did, claim authority over such turbulent subject-matter as the sea, it was not kings, but priests. Ecclesiastical history relates the calamitous visitation of earthquake and inundations by which Epidaurus must once, and for ever, have been overwhelmed, had not the prudent citizens placed St. Hilarion, an Egyptian monk, on the beach. "He made the sign of the cross; the mountain-wave stopped, bowed, and returned." One's respect

for the great qualities of the fearless Akbah, traversing the wilds of Africa, and at length penetrating to the verge of the Atlantic, is not lessened by what Gibbon relates of him :—that his career, though not his zeal, being checked by the prospect of a boundless ocean, Akbah spurred his horse into the waves, and raising his eyes to heaven, exclaimed with the tone of a fanatic, "Great God, if my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name." And the picture reminds us of another, some eight centuries later, when Constantinople was besieged and taken by Mahomet II., who, while his ships were engaged against those of the Genoese, sat on horseback on the beach, to encourage by voice and presence the valour of the faithful: "The passions of his soul, and even the gestures of his body, seemed to imitate the action of the combatants; and, as if he had been the lord of nature, he spurred his horse with a fearless and impotent effort into the sea." Sir Archibald Alison moralises on the spectacle of Napoleon, in 1804, reviewing, or intending to review, the naval force by which he designed to crush the British power: the flotilla being tempest-tost when it hove in sight, and several vessels stranded-an event "destined to teach the French Emperor, like Canute the Dane, that there were bounds to his power, and that his might was limited to the element on which his army stood." The sea-c'est autre chose.

It is of Tiberius, absolute master of the vastest, richest empire ever seen under the sun, that an eminent French preacher is treating when he says that an adulatory senator kept repeating to him in every tone and accent that his authority was without bounds. Tiberius would fain have believed the assurance, if the illusion had been possible,—if he had not felt himself at every instant heurté contre une barrière infranchissable. The emperor's flatterers had forgotten, for one thing, to secure a peremptory decree against the inconvenient limitation called time. His days were numbered. And in vain Tiberius essayed to trick and elude death, and dissembled with himself as to the stubborn fact of its resistless advance.

Kings, great nobles, and the like, as a popular essayist observes, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming even at wind and rain, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, for insubordination and disrespect of persons. A popular novelist, again, having to describe a fashionable wedding in the country on a portentously wet and stormy day, makes the Lisford beadle, "who was a sound Tory of the old school," almost wonder that the heavens themselves should be audacious enough to wet the uncovered head of the lord of Jocelyn's Rock. "But it went on raining nevertheless." It was in no such spirit that John Bunyan once was all but resolved on putting to the test the reality of his faith, by commanding some water puddles to be dry.

Mr. Carlyle made a picturesque application of the royal Dane's injunction to the waves, in his survey of the advancing tide of the French Revolution-grim host marching on, the black-browed Marseillese in the van, with hum and murmur, far-heard; like the ocean-tide, "drawn up, as if by Luna and Influences, from the great deep of waters, they roll gleaming on; no king, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back." To quite another effect is Judge Haliburton's application of the incident, in his panegyric on the capabilities of the Southampton docks. It was here, he says, that Cnut sat in his arm-chair, to show his courtiers (after he gave up drinking and murder) that though he was a mighty prince, he could not control the sea. "Well, what Canute could not do, your dock company has accomplished. It has actually said to the sea, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther:' and the waves have obeyed the mandate.

By poetical licence a Cornish poet of the present day ascribes to his rock-bound coast a ne plus ultra control over an ever-aggressive sea: he pictures the embattled advance of the waves, and their discomfiture and retreat :

"They come they mount-they charge in vain.
Thus far, incalculable main;

No more! Thine hosts have not o'erthrown
The lichen on the barrier stone.
Have the rocks faith that thus they stand,
Unmoved, a grim and stately band,
And look, like warriors tried and brave,
Stern, silent, reckless, o'er the wave?"

One, and one alone, is veritably the ruler of the waves. When the floods are risen, when the floods have lift up their voice, and lift up their waves, to Him only it pertaineth to still their tumultuous clamour, and to level their aspiring crests. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. "O Lord God of hosts, who is like unto Thee? . Thou rulest the raging of the sea: Thou stillest the waves thereof when they arise." With a moral application we conclude, borrowed from one whose was ever the pen of a ready writer to point a moral. Some dream, says Cowper, that

"they can silence when they will

The storm of passion, and say, 'Peace, be still :'

But Thus far and no farther,' when addressed

To the wild wave, or wilder human breast,

Implies authority that never can,

That never ought to be the lot of man."

SOUN

IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES.

I SAMUEL Xxvi. 8-25.

OUNDLY the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches-his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. "Now, there

fore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time." But David was inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him. was it to stretch forth a hand against the Lord's anointed. So Saul slept on, and the shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul's bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived-for no man saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched; and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue.

Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day. Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to Unwin,-that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. "When in some of the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were undoubtedly designed," as Cowper is devoutly convinced, "to convey to him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the least suspicion." It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey