‘What mean these words?’ The clerk made answer meet,
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
And hath exalted them of low degree.’
Thereat King Robert muttered scornfully,
’Tis well that such seditious words are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue;
For unto priests and people be it known
There is no power can push me from my throne!’”
The sequel teaches him a different lesson, which he learns by (and lays to) heart.
In those days, however, if any order of men might, or did, claim authority over such turbulent subject-matter as the sea, it was not kings, but priests. Ecclesiastical history relates the calamitous visitation of earthquake and inundations by which Epidaurus must once, and for ever, have been overwhelmed, had not the prudent citizens placed St. Hilarion, an Egyptian monk, on the beach. “He made the sign of the cross; the mountain-wave stopped, bowed, and returned.” One’s respect for the great qualities of the fearless Akbah, traversing the wilds of Africa, and at length penetrating to the verge of the Atlantic, is not lessened by what Gibbon relates of him:—that his career, though not his zeal, being checked by the prospect of a boundless ocean, Akbah spurred his horse into the waves, and raising his eyes to heaven, exclaimed with the tone of a fanatic, “Great God, if my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name.” And the picture reminds us of another, some eight centuries later, when Constantinople was besieged and taken by Mahomet II., who, while his ships were engaged against those of the Genoese, sat on horseback on the beach, to encourage by voice and presence the valour of the faithful: “The passions of his soul, and even the gestures of his body, seemed to imitate the action of the combatants; and, as if he had been the lord of nature, he spurred his horse with a fearless and impotent effort into the sea.” Sir Archibald Alison moralises on the spectacle of Napoleon, in 1804, reviewing, or intending to review, the naval force by which he designed to crush the British power: the flotilla being tempest-tost when it hove in sight, and several vessels stranded—an event “destined to teach the French Emperor, like Canute the Dane, that there were bounds to his power, and that his might was limited to the element on which his army stood.” The sea—c’est autre chose.