Thus justice and great God have ordered it!
So that the scene of evil has been turned
Against the actor; pain paid back with pain;
And poison given for poison.”
Prescott’s narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale; that “by one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans of the wisest, the column which the minister had so artfully raised for his support served only to crush him.” Sæpe intereunt aliis meditantes necem; and that by the very means mediated.
“For ’tis the sport, to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard,”
says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows, by a certain mischance, might
“have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aimed them;”