Splendid was that festival at Cæsarea at which Herod Agrippa, in the pomp and pride of power, entered the theatre in a robe of silver, which glittered, says the historian, with the morning rays of the sun, so as to dazzle the eyes of the assembly, and excite general admiration. Some of his flatterers set up the shout, “A present god!” Agrippa did not repress the impious adulation which spread through the theatre. At that moment he looked up, and saw an owl perched over his head on a rope, and Agrippa had been forewarned that when next he saw that bird, “at the height of his fortune,” he would die within five days. The fatal omen, according to Josephus, pierced the heart of the king, who, with deep melancholy, exclaimed, “Your god will soon suffer the common lot of mortality.” He was immediately struck, in the language of the sacred volume, by an angel. Seized with violent pains, he was carried to his palace, lingered five days in extreme agony, being “eaten of worms,” and so died. Fielding forcibly presents a certain sanguine projector, lusty and strong, in the heyday of middle age, who reckons confidently on becoming heir to the estate of a senior of immense wealth, and has all his plans elaborately prepared for his disposal of the same. Nothing is wanting to enable him to enter upon the immediate execution of these plans, but the death of the elder man, in calculating which he has studied every book extant that treats of the value of lives, reversions, etc.; from all which he has satisfied himself, that as he has every day a chance of this happening, so has he more an even chance of its happening before long. “But while the captain was one day busied in deep contemplations of this kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as most unseasonable, accidents happened to him. The utmost malice of fortune could, indeed, have contrived nothing so cruel, so _mal-à-propos_, so absolutely destructive to all his schemes.” It was, that just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by the other’s death, he himself was cut off by an apoplexy. As Léontine complains in “Heraclius,”— “Et lorsque le hasard me flatte avec excès, Tout mon dessein avorte au milieu du succès.” It was just when Kleber was beginning to reap the fruits of his intrepidity and discretion, that he was cut off by the obscure assassin, Souliman. One is reminded of Thomson on the massacre of the bees,— “At evening snatched, Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night, And fixed o’er sulphur; while not dreaming ill, The happy people in their waxen cells, Sat tending public cares, and planning schemes Of temperance, for winter poor,” etc.