Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan, how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?” And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves, he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?... Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself.... Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy: “Craignez, seigneur, craignez que le ciel rigoureux Ne vous haïsse assez pour exaucer vos vœux.” And two scenes later Theseus is himself sufficiently of the same mind to exclaim: “Ne précipite point tes funestes bienfaits, Neptune! j’aime mieux n’être exaucé jamais.” And afterwards again he utters the tristful line: “Inexorables dieux! qui m’avez trop servi.” So in a subsequent passage: “Je hais jusqu’aux soins dont m’honorent les dieux: Et je m’en vais pleurer leurs faveurs meurtrières, Sans plus les fatiguer d’inutiles prières. Quoi qu’ils fissent pour moi, leur funeste bonté Ne me saurait payer de ce qu’ils m’ont ôté.” Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters to Bussy, moralizes on the superior wisdom of Heaven’s disposal to man’s proposal; and adds: “C’est ainsi que nous marchons en aveugles, ne sachant où nous allons, prenant pour mauvais ce qui est bon, prenant pour bon ce qui est mauvais, et toujours dans une entière ignorance.” The optative mood of yesterday, a past tense, is changed in the present tense of to-day for deprecation and regret.