without lending a moment’s credit to the foul insinuation, nevertheless is free to recognise the equity of this retribution revolving upon one who, he asserts, had so often slandered others in the same malicious way. “At last the poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a moment when it wounded the most acutely.” _Sæpe_, as Seneca has it, _in magistrum scelera redierunt sua_. For “in these cases We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice To our own lips.” Plutarch rejoices in showing in Hercules an avenger who adapted the special mode of vengeance to the distinctive deserts of the wrong-doer. He punished with the very mode of punishment devised by those who were now made to suffer it. Antæus he killed in wrestling, and Termerus by breaking his skull,—it being the _specialité_ of Termerus to destroy the passengers he met by dashing his head against theirs. Theseus was the imitator of Hercules in this retributive system; he punished Sinis, a bandit,—who used to kill travellers by binding them to the boughs of two pine-trees, which were then allowed to swing back and separate—by making an end of him in the self-same way; Procrustes again he stretched on his own bed. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, infamous for his cruelty, and specially for the device devised for him by Perillus of a brazen bull in which he burnt his victims—this Phalaris first tried the device on this Perillus; and when Phalaris was deposed an indignant mob practised upon _him_ the self-same torture to which he had subjected so many. And ever memorable among other tales of antiquity,—old wives’ fables if you will, but then have not all fables a moral?—is that of Diomedes, who was devoured by the horses he had himself taught to feed on the flesh and blood of men. “Ashes always fly back in the face of him that throws them,” is a proverb in the Yoruba language, quoted by Archbishop Trench as equivalent to our “Harm watch, harm catch,” and perhaps to the Spanish, “He that sows thorns, let him not walk barefoot.” An overruling Power disposes of what the malignity of man proposes, and “Thus doth it force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms.”