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