Who lays the last stone of his sea-built tower,
It cost him years and years of toil to raise,—
And, smiling at it, tells the wind and waves
To roar and whistle now—but, in a night,
Beholds the tempest sporting in its place—
May look aghast.”
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand, and displayed the golden vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple at Jerusalem, and was jubilant with the excitement of revelry, and joyously confident in the stability of his realm; when, in the same hour, there came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and what they wrote was, that God had numbered his kingdom, and finished it. And in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.
A noble chamber had Pope John XXI. built for himself in the palace of Viterbo; and by the falling in of the roof he so admired, he was crushed to death. “John XXI.,” writes Dean Milman, “was contemplating with too great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; at that instant the avenging roof came down on his head.” The catastrophe was held at the time to be a special judgment on a reprobate pontiff. Nebuchadnezzar’s boast, and worse than Nebuchadnezzar’s doom. The mention of Babylon the Great will serve, with some, to eke out a parallel.
The historian of Mexico tells us of Montezuma, while exacting from his people the homage of an adulation worthy of an oriental despot, and the profuse expenditure of whose court was a standing marvel, that “while the empire seemed towering in its most palmy and prosperous state, the canker had eaten deepest into its heart.” Ruin was at hand. The hour was come, and the man; and that man was Hernando Cortès.
Significantly opens a fifth act—for a fifth act is the last—of Ben Jonson’s “Sejanus,” with the joyous exultations of that prosperous upstart, in the confidence of power: “Swell, swell, my joys,” he exclaims,—