Woe was denounced by one of old on another of the Dives family, who said, “I will build me a wide house, and large chambers,” and who cut him out windows, and ceiled his house with cedar, and painted it with vermilion. “Shalt thou reign because thou closest thyself in cedar?” Man’s sanguine and sure “I will”—how little of the future tense there sometimes is about it after all! “Tu secanda marmora Locas sub ipsum funus; et sepulchri Immemor, struis domos.” In Homer we see from his tall ship the king of men descend, there fondly thinking the gods conclude his toil, where, in fact, awaits him murder most foul and most unnatural. In Homeric figure— “So, whilst he feeds luxurious in the stall, The sovereign of the herd is doomed to fall.” Bitterly the shade of Atrides repeats his tragic story to Odysseus, telling how, “Alas! he hoped, the toils of war o’ercome, to meet soft quiet and repose at home. Delusive hope!” for at home the hand was already upraised to smite him. The Turkish prince, Alp Arslan, dying of Joseph’s dagger-stroke, bequeathed an admonition to the pride of kings, which Gibbon has preserved. “Yesterday, as from an eminence I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under my feet; and I said in my heart, ‘Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors.’ These armies are no longer mine; and in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an assassin.” The inscription on his tomb invited those who had seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, to meditate on its present burial in the dust. Michelet moralises with trenchant irony on the fate which overtook our Henry V. on French soil. It is to the “Dance of Death” he refers in the exclamation, “What sport for death, what a malicious pastime to have brought the victorious Harry within a month’s reach of the crown of France! After a life of unremitting toil for that end, he wanted but one little month added to his existence to be the survivor of Charles VI.... No! not a month, not a day more was to be his.”