I live with bread, like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends:—subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?”
A king, that is, in their sense of right Divine, and Divine extent. So with poor, mad, discrowned Lear, drenched in that terrible storm on the heath, and remembering soft speeches of cozening courtiership, only of yesterday too. “When the rain came to wet me, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.” Mark, again, from the opening scene of the “Tempest,” the rough, blunt, uncivil words with which the boatswain cuts short the addresses of his royal passengers:—
“Hence! What care these roarers [the waves] for the name of king? To cabin: silence: trouble us not.
“Gonzalo. Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
“Boatswain. None that I love more than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to a silence, and work the peace of the present [instant], we will not hand a rope more: use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if so it hap. Cheerily, good hearts.—Out of our way, I say!”
Of Antiochus Epiphanes, and his pride that had a fall, it is written in the book of Maccabees: “And thus he that a little afore thought he might command the waves of the sea (so proud was he beyond the condition of man), and weigh the high mountains in a balance, was now cast on the ground.”
An elder king than Cnut, and not a wiser, not only lashed the winds that blew contrary to his will, but bound the sea with fetters, after a sort:
“Ipsum compedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigæum.”