Naples to Pompey a kind fever gave, to hide his honours in a welcome grave (the poetry of Parson Owen may pardonably be printed as prose). But public prayers arise: the gods allow the health requested by the erring vow: by Rome’s and his cross fate that grave he fled, and lived—to lose his honours and his head.
... “Sed multæ urbes, et publica vota
Vicerunt. Igitur fortuna ipsius, et urbis,
Servatum victo caput abstulit.”
Juvenal crowds his satire with cases in point, historical and mythological, political and domestic. The sum of the discourse is this: that man should allow the higher powers themselves to determine what may be of advantage to him, and suitable to his real wants,—he being dearer to them than to himself:
“Permittes ipsis expendere Numinibus quid
Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris:
Nam pro jocundis aptissima quæque dabunt Dii.
Carior est illis homo quàm sibi.”
Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan, how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?” And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves, he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?... Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself.... Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy: