It was in the mid hey-day of military triumph that Paulus Æmilius astonished his encircling admirers by, first, a prolonged silence, and next, a sombre homily on the vicissitudes of fortune, and of human affairs. What time for confidence can there be to man, he asked, when in the very instant of victory he must necessarily dread the power of fortune, and the very joy of success must be mingled with anxiety—_aliquid solliciti_—from a reflection on the course of unsparing fate, which humbles one man to-day, and to-morrow another! Gladdening is the gourd, with its pleasant promise of protection against the arrow that flieth by day from a burning sun; but only him can it make, like Jonah, exceeding glad, who knows not, or makes a point of forgetting, what a worm can do, between a setting and a rising sun. The night thoughts of man in general are one with the Night Thoughts of Young in particular, when he exclaims, “How sad a sight is human happiness To those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour! —Know, smiler! at thy peril thou art pleased: Thy pleasure is the promise of thy pain.” This is the state of man, by the experience of Shakspeare’s Wolsey: to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms, and bears his blushing honours thick upon him. He is exceeding glad, even as the prophet of his gourd; but a worm is preparing, or if not, a frost; and next day, or at latest “The third day, comes a frost, a killing frost; And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls.” The worm may speed in its mission, or otherwise; but the fulfilment of its mission is only a question of time. There is a ... “little rift within the lute, That by-and-by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. “The little rift within the lover’s lute Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit, That, rotting onward slowly moulders all.” Slowly, sometimes, but surely. Not so slowly as surely. Remembering both the “foolish pride” of Jonah in his gourd, and his “impious discontentment” at the decree which smote it, which of us but might, for ourselves, do worse than adopt the words and the spirit of one verse at least of Pope’s Universal Prayer, “Save me alike from foolish pride And impious discontent At aught Thy wisdom hath denied, Or aught Thy bounty lent.” _SELF-PRAISE._ PROVERBS xxvii. 2.