ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14. The rich man in the parable was self-complacently far-sighted in his foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years; but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing: many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the worldlings censured by St. James. “Go to now, ye that say, to-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is called to-day,—hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a _memento mori_,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter, whose style is, “Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.” Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. Macbeth’s threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue:— “TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.” So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is still, _They come_—even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors; and the cry of “The queen, my lord, is dead,” but elicits for response, “She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.—_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow._”... In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction, pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,— ... “Here will I lie to-night; [_Soldiers begin to set up the King’s tent._ But where to-morrow?—Well, all’s one for that.” To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on the eve of Hotspur’s encounter with the king’s forces at Shrewsbury,— “To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day Wherein the fortune of ten thousand men Must ’bide the touch.”