Fabius, to think that God hath interlined The human hand like some prophetic page, And in the wrinkles of the palm defined As in a map, our mortal pilgrimage, This is to follow, with the multitude Error and Ignorance, their common guides, Yet Heaven hath placed, for evil or for good, Our fate in our own hands, whate'er betides Being as we make it. Art thou not a king Thyself my friend, when envying not the lot Of thrones, ambition hath for thee no sting, Laws are to thee as they existed not, And in thy harmless station no event Can shake the calm of its assured content. “Nature” says a Cheirologist, “was a careful workman in the creation of the human body. She hath set in the hand of man certain signs and tokens of the heart, brain and liver, because in them it is that the life of man chiefly consists, but she hath not done so of the eyes, ears, mouth, hands and feet, because those parts of the body seem rather to be made for a comeliness or beauty, than for any necessity.” What he meant to say was that any accident which threatened the three vital parts was betokened in the lines of the palm, but that the same fashioning was not necessary in relation to parts which might be injured without inducing the loss of life. Therefore every man's palm has in it the lines relating to the three noble parts, the more minute lines are only found on subjects of finer texture, and if they originally existed in husbandmen and others whose hands are rendered callous by their employments, they are effaced. It was only cheirologically speaking that he disparaged what sailors in their emphatic language so truly call our precious eyes and limbs, not that he estimated them like Tippoo Sultan, who in one of his letters says, that if people persisted in visiting a certain person who was under his displeasure, “their ears and noses should be dispensed with.” This strange tyrant wrote odes in praise of himself, and describes the effect of his just government to be such, that in the security of his protection “the deer of the forest made their pillow of the lion and the tyger, and their mattress of the leopard and the panther.”