Much good it did him: witness his return from his great expedition, in a poor skiff, wind-tossed across waves red with the blood of his slaughtered host, cruentis fluctibus. The stars in their courses once fought against Sisera, and the fettered waves were little more propitious to speed the fortunes of Xerxes. He might have spared his chains. At any rate he lost his army. Archdeacon Hare practically applied the extravagance of the Great King, as they of Persia were styled, in designating the present (or, rather, what was to him the present) as an age when men will scoff at the madness of Xerxes, yet themselves try to fling their chains over the ever-rolling, irrepressible ocean of thought; nay, they will scoop out a mimic sea in their pleasure-ground, he goes on to say, and make it ripple and bubble, and spout up prettily into the air, and then fancy that they are taming the Atlantic; which, however, keeps advancing upon them, until it sweeps them away with their toys.
It is edifying to read in the Diary of Mr. Pepys how, one July afternoon, soon after the king had come back to enjoy his own again, that gentleman went upon the river, but had to put ashore and shelter himself from the rain that rained so hard; during which time came by the king in his barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the queen: “But methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.”
Instructive, too, is the tenor of the legend of King Robert of Sicily, which has been so attractively treated in prose by Leigh Hunt, in his Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and in verse by Professor Longfellow, in his Tales of a Wayside Inn. There we read how the king with his nobles proudly sat at vespers, on St. John’s Eve, and heard the priests chant the Magnificat:—
“And, as he listened, o’er and o’er again
Repeated, like a burden or refrain,
He caught the words, ‘Deposuit potentes
De sede, et exaltavit humiles;’
And slowly lifting up his kingly head,
He to a learned clerk beside him said,