Prescott’s narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale; that “by one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans of the wisest, the column which the minister had so artfully raised for his support served only to crush him.” _Sæpe intereunt aliis meditantes necem_; and that by the very means mediated. “For ’tis the sport, to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard,” says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows, by a certain mischance, might “have reverted to my bow again, And not where I had aimed them;” and arrows, so returning, are by poetical justice apt to do the foiled bowman a mischief. That king’s fellow-conspirator, Laertes, is thus punished, and owns it:— “_Osric._ How is’t, Laertes? _Laertes._ Why as a woodcock to my own springe, Osric; I am justly killed with mine own treachery.” And so is the king himself; and he, Laertes testifies,— “is justly served: It is a poison tempered by himself” for Hamlet, which Claudius has just drank of, and drinking died. The tragedy of the prince of Denmark does indeed abound in instances of what Horatio calls “Accidental judgments, casual slaughters, And deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on the inventors’ heads.” _TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE._ ST. MATTHEW vi. 34. With a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount—spoken as never man spake—which bid us take “no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself: “Lætus in præsens animus quod ultra est Oderit curare.”