What manner of man? Be it legend or history, the story of royal Cnut on the seashore, forbidding, at his flatterers’ instigation, or by his own desire to rebuke their folly—forbidding the farther approach of the incoming tide, is pregnant with instruction on this head. The royal Dane might be a man of men, but the surging waves were not obedient unto his voice. King though he was, the tide was responseless as deaf adder to any charming of his, charmed he never so wisely, enjoined he never so straitly. What manner of man, then, but the Son of man? What manner of king but the King of kings? The Dane might have enforced the lesson on his parasites by such a strain as that of a defeated monarch in Shakspeare:— “Farewell king! Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence; throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while: I live with bread, like you, feel want, taste grief, Need friends:—subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?” A king, that is, in _their_ sense of right Divine, and Divine extent. So with poor, mad, discrowned Lear, drenched in that terrible storm on the heath, and remembering soft speeches of cozening courtiership, only of yesterday too. “When the rain came to wet me, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.” Mark, again, from the opening scene of the “Tempest,” the rough, blunt, uncivil words with which the boatswain cuts short the addresses of his royal passengers:— “Hence! What care these roarers [the waves] for the name of king? To cabin: silence: trouble us not. “_Gonzalo._ Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard. “_Boatswain._ None that I love more than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to a silence, and work the peace of the present [instant], we will not hand a rope more: use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if so it hap. Cheerily, good hearts.—Out of our way, I say!” Of Antiochus Epiphanes, and his pride that had a fall, it is written in the book of Maccabees: “And thus he that a little afore thought he _might command the waves of the sea_ (so proud was he beyond the condition of man), and weigh the high mountains in a balance, was now cast on the ground.” An elder king than Cnut, and not a wiser, not only lashed the winds that blew contrary to his will, but bound the sea with fetters, after a sort: “Ipsum compedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigæum.”