The psalmist felt that he was praying in accordance with the Divine will, when he prayed that the ungodly might fall into their own nets together, while he ever escaped them. So again with his prayer that the mischief of their own lips might fall upon the heads of them that compassed him about. For it was a matter at once of faith and of experience with the psalmist, that the evil deviser and evil-doer, travailing with mischief, conceiving sorrow, and bringing forth ungodliness, who had graven and digged up a pit, was apt to fall himself into the destruction that he made for other. “For his travail shall come upon his own head, and his wickedness shall fall on his own pate.” Owen Feltham delights to recall, from the stores of ancient and mediæval story, how Bagoas, a Persian nobleman, having poisoned Artaxerxes and Artamenes, was detected by Darius, and forced to drink poison himself; how Diomedes, as we have already seen, for the beasts he had fed on human flesh was by Hercules made food; and how Pope Alexander VI., having designed the poisoning of his friend Cardinal Adrian, by his cup-bearer’s mistake of the bottle, took the draught himself, “and so died by the same engine which he himself had appointed to kill another”—a sort of enginery glanced at in Ben Jonson:— “I have you in a purse-net, Good master Picklock, with your worming brain, And wriggling engine-head” too clever by half. Luther, in his Table-talk, welcomes the import of the Jewish story of Og, king of Bashan, who they say had lifted a great rock to throw at his enemies, “but God made a hole in the middle, so that it slipped down upon the giant’s neck, and he could never rid himself of it.” The fourth book of Southey’s “Thalaba” closes with a shriek from Lobaba the sorcerer, which this final stanza sufficiently explains: “What, wretch, and hast thou raised The rushing terrors of the wilderness, To fall on thine own head? Death! death! inevitable death! Driven by the breath of God, A column of the desert met his way.” Nor, among the lyrical pieces of the same poet, be forgotten that ballad of the Inchcape rock, which tells how the bell put up by the abbot of Aberbrothok to warn ships of their peril, was taken down by a sea pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, who in the words of an old Scottish topographer, “a yeare thereafter perished upon the same rocke, with ship and goodes, in the righteous judgment of God.” Many and many “stories have been told of men whose lives Were infamous, and so their end. I mean That the red murderer has himself been murdered; The traitor struck with treason; he who let The orphan perish came himself to want: Thus justice and great God have ordered it! So that the scene of evil has been turned Against the actor; pain paid back with pain; And poison given for poison.”