When Mr. Thackeray propounds the query, Who can foresee everything, and always? and returns his own answer (a sufficiently safe one), Not the wisest amongst us,—he does so in reference to the counsels of the worldly woman who governed and directed the Newcome family; which counsels bore results so different from what that elderly lady desired, and foresaw. And he proceeds to point his moral by the tale of a French king’s fall. “When his majesty, Louis XIV., jockied his grandson on to the throne of Spain (founding thereby the present revered dynasty of that country), did he expect to peril his own, and bring all Europe about his royal ears? Could a late King of France, eager for the advantageous establishment of one of his darling sons, and anxious to procure a beautiful Spanish princess, with a crown and kingdom in reversion, for the simple and obedient youth, ever suppose that the welfare of his whole august race and reign would be upset by that smart speculation?” The master of irony professes to take only the most noble examples to illustrate the conduct of such a noble old personage as her ladyship of Kew, who brought a prodigious deal of trouble upon some of the innocent members of her family, whom no doubt she thought to better in life by her experienced guidance, and undoubted worldly wisdom. We may be as deep as Jesuits, he continues,—may know the world ever so well, lay the best ordered plans, and the profoundest combinations,—and by a certain not unnatural turn of fate, we, and our plans and combinations, are sent flying before the wind. “We may be as wise as Louis Philippe, that many counselled Ulysses whom the respectable world admired so; and after years of patient scheming, and prodigies of skill; after coaxing, wheedling, doubling, bullying wisdom, behold, yet stronger powers interpose: and schemes and skill and violence are nought.” As Schiller’s Wallenstein puts it, in his rather heathenish way— “For jealous are the powers of destiny. Joy premature, and shouts ere victory, Encroach upon their rights and privileges. We sow the seed, and they the growth determine.” “Il y a,” in the words of a masterly French moralist, “je ne sais quelle _force cachée_, a dit Lucrèce (ce que d’autres avec Bossuet nommeront Providence), qui semble se plaire à briser les choses humaines, à faire manquer d’un coup l’appereil établi de la puissance, et à déjouer la pièce, juste au moment ou elle promettait de mieux aller.” O fate of fools! exclaims Zara, in the “Mourning Bride,”—“officious in contriving; in executing, puzzled, lame, and lost;” a rebuke which Selim deprecates in his reply:— “Prescience is Heaven’s alone, not given to man. If I have failed in what, as being man, I needs must fail, impute not as a crime My nature’s want.”