Should have gone forth, and hurl'd him from his throne Down to the fiery floor of Padalon. That hour went by.* • ... The most satirical of modern poets, and most poetical of modern satirists, begins a stanza on the Shakspeare text: There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood"-you know the rest, And most of us have found it now and then; At least, we think so, though but few have guess'd So the author of "Gryll Grange," in one of his imitations from the Oh, who art thou so fast proceeding, Ne'er glancing back thine eyes of flame? What form is that which scowls beside thee? Learn then, the fate may yet betide thee: Occasio primâ sui parte comosa, posteriori parte calva, quam si occuparis, teneas; elapsam semel, non ipse Jupiter possit reprehendere. Opportunity has hair in front, but is bald behind: if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her fast; but let her once elude you, and not Jupiter himself can catch her again. Cato commemorates the forelock in a pentameter, Fronte capillatâ, post est occasio calva. And Gregory Nazianzen bids us seize opportunity, which may be caught as it nears, but, once passed, is irrecoverable quite : καιροῖο λαβώμεθα, ὅν προσιόντα Εστιν ἑλεῖν, ζητεῖν δὲ παραθρέξαντα, μάταιον. Καιρὸν γνῶθι. Kaipov yv@bi. Occasionem cognosce. What language, living or dead, but has its literal translation of that text? Make use of time! The hour that is not used Is lost, and might have been the luckiest, So writes one of the most popular of latter-day dramatists. A great author-which is more than he can be called-but whose one or two tragedies remain unacted, and only not quite unread-thus expresses, in a dramatic fragment, the trite old text: Why, now I have Dame Fortune by the forelock, He that hath buffeted with stern adversity, Best knows to shape his course to favouring breezes.|| *The Curse of Kehama, § vii. Imitated from Machiavelli's Capitolo dell' Occasione. † Byron. § Sheridan Knowles: The Wife, a Tale of Mantua, Act IV. Sc. 3. Sir Walter Scott.-The fragment is one of those nominally from some Old Play, which he loved to prefix by way of motto to his chapters, the present one being prefixed to one of the concluding chapters of the "Bride of Lammermoor." Luther used to urge strenuously, in his table-talk, the all-importance of seizing Occasion by the forelock, if only because of the baldness behind. Julius Cæsar, he would say, understood occasion; Pompey and Hannibal did not. So he would warn young students against thinking to-morrow will be time enough for study. "But I say, No, fellow. What little Jack learns not, great John learns not. Occasion salutes thee, and reaches out her forelock to thee, saying, "Here I am, take hold of me ;' thou thinkest she will come again. Then says she: Well, seeing thou wilt not take hold of my top, take hold of my tail;' and therewith flings away. "Bonaventura," continues Doctor Martin, was but a poor sophist, yet he could say: He that neglects opportunity is of it neglected;—and we have a saying, Take hold of time, while 'tis time, and now, while 'tis now. Our emperor Charles understood not occasion, when he took the French king prisoner before Pavia, in 1525; nor afterwards, when he got into his hands Pope Clement, and had taken Rome in 1527; nor in 1529, when he almost got hold of the great Turk before Vienna. 'Twas monstrous negligence for a monarch to have in his hands his three great enemies, and yet let them go."* Such negligence as Pompey's (the younger) when the triumvirate were on board his galley. Or such, in another sense, and on other grounds, as Illo taxes Wallenstein withal, in Schiller's fine trilogy, when the assembled chiefs are yet with him : -Seize, seize the hour, Ere it slips from you. Seldom comes the moment To make a great decision possible, O! many things, all transient and all rapid, This is that moment. See, our army chieftains, The single threads, which here your prosperous fortune Instinct with destiny, O let them not Bring you them not a second time together. 'Tis the high tide that heaves the stranded ship, &c. After a fervid description of the Jewish triumph in tented field over Caius Cestius-a loss to the Romans unparalleled since the defeat of Crassus; two legions being destroyed, six thousand bodies left on the field, and the whole preparation for the siege of Jerusalem falling into the enemies' hands, then was the hour, exclaims Salathiel the Immortal, to have struck the final blow for freedom; "then was given that chance of restoration which Providence gives to every nation and every man. But our crimes, our wild feuds, the bigoted fury and polluted licence of our factions, rose up as a cloud between us and the light ;-we were made to be ruined."+ Why, cries the patriot poet, stood Scotland idly on dark Flodden's * Luthers Tischreden, § 892. †The Piccolomini (Coleridge's transl.), Act II. Sc. 6. airy brow, to see England gain the pass, and struggle through the dark defile ? O for one hour of Wallace wight, From Fate's dark book a leaf been torn, When Mr. Froude has to record the marriage of James V., King of Scots, with Magdalen de Valois (in 1537), he does so with a lament on the folly of the queen-mother in not otherwise ordering the course of things. Why not, as once she might have done, unite England and Scotland in uniting James Stuart and Mary Tudor? For "there had been a moment," is Mr. Froude's assertion, when it rested with her to have anticipated the union of the kingdoms, and to have coloured (it is impossible to conjecture how deeply) the complexion of their fortunes. Had she played her part, the historian argues, the marriage would have been arranged between James and Mary; an act of parliament would have declared them, should no male heir be born to the king, joint inheritors of the two crowns; and in that case, it is inferred, there would have been no divorce of Catherine, for there would have been no object for a divorce. "No miserable scandals would have clouded the declining years of Henry. Perhaps there would have been no breach with Rome, and no Reformation in the form which it in fact assumed. On the behaviour of such poor creatures as Margaret events of so mighty moment at times depend." She let the moment, thus mightily momentous, glide by; and the grand peut-être of the historian must be consigned to the limbo of historical might-have-beens. Treating of Pizarro's stern resolution at the crisis of his career, with his handful of men on a lonely rock in the sea, staking his life and theirs on the success of his crusade against a powerful empire, Mr. Prescottwho sees nothing in the legends of chivalry to surpass it-expresses the common sentiment, that moments there are in the lives of men, which, as they are seized or neglected, decide their future destiny. Had Pizarro faltered from his strong purpose, and yielded to the occasion so temptingly presented, at the crisis in question, for extricating himself and his broken band from their desperate position, his name would have been buried with his fortunes, and the conquest of Peru would have been left for other and more successful adventurers. But his constancy was equal to the occasion, and he led on, or was led on, to fortune, by thus taking the tide at the flood. Nor does the historian of the Conquest of Peru,—a loving student of Italian literature,-fail to refer in his foot-notes to the " common beauty" with which the "common sentiment" has been expressed by "the fanciful Boiardo," where he represents Rinaldo as catch * Marmion, canto vi. § xx. † Froude, History of England, vol. iv. p. 44. See Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, book ii. ch. iv. un ing Fortune (under the guise of the fickle fairy Morgana) by the forelock: Ponga la mano a questa chioma d'oro The Cardinal de Retz, if he often did foolish things, sometimes said a wise one. And such is his dictum, already quoted, on critical moments for action, to wit, that for everything in the world there is a moment décisif; to know and to seize which, is the height of worldly wisdom. Sage and stalwart old Agrippa d'Aubigné knew his man and knew his moment when he thus respectfully admonished Henri Quatre: "Sire, ce que vous ferez dans une heure donnera bon ou mauvais branle à tout le reste de votre vie, et vous fera roi ou rien." The heure in question was that of the death of Henry III. What the Bourbon would do, or not do, at this juncture, would make or mar him. He must now assert and secure himself, or be for ever fallen. The choice lay before him in effect, roi ou rien. Nor was Henry the Bourbon insensible to the large issues of momentous crises. He writes, himself, of the year 1588: "Je ne puis faillir d'être bientôt ou fou ou habile homme. Cette année sera ma pierre de touche." The expression is quoted by M. de Sainte-Beuve,-who adds, that in fact the year 1588 was Henry's touchstone; and that he, being then in his thirty-fifth year, issued from it the statesman we know him to be. With all his veneration for the royal statesmanship of William III., Lord Macaulay is free to own the astute Dutchman to have been at fault, at least once upon a time. The period referred to is in 1699, when signs of a reaction of feeling were so discernible both in and out of Parliament; and those people who must always, as the historian puts it, be afraid of something, as they could no longer be afraid of a standing army, began to be afraid of the French king. "There was a turn in the tide of public opinion; and no part of statesmanship is more important than the art of taking the tide of public opinion at the turn. On more than one occasion William showed himself a master of that art. But, on the present occasion, a sentiment, in itself amiable and respectable, led him to commit the greatest mistake of his whole life." Had he, Lord Macaulay argues, earnestly pressed on the Houses at this conjuncture the importance of providing for the defence of the kingdom, and asked of them an additional number of English troops, it is not improbable that he might have carried his point; it is certain that, if he had failed, there would have been nothing ignominious in his failure. But, unhappily, instead of raising a great public question, on which he was in the right, William chose to raise a personal question, on which he was in the wrong: “Instead of pressing for more English regiments, he exerted all his influence to obtain for the Dutch guards permission to remain in the island."§ And so he had to stem a strong tide that set in dead against him, instead of being led on to fortune by taking the tide at the turn. In his essay on Temple, the same noble historian had commemorated the neglect of the French and English allies against the Dutch republic * Orlando Innamorato, l. ii. canto viii. † Mémoires de D'Aubigné. § Macaulay, History of England, ch. xxiv. to improve their auspicious moment-when the people of the United Provinces were all confusion and consternation at the progress of the French armies within their territory, and in the madness of despair turned their rage against the most illustrious of their fellow-citizens,— De Ruyter being with difficulty saved from assassins, while De Witt was torn to pieces by an infuriated rabble; and no hope seemed left to the Commonwealth, save in what Macaulay styles the "dauntless, the ardent, the indefatigable, the unconquerable spirit which glowed under the frigid demeanour of" the same William aforesaid; at that time, however, uo King of England, but the young Prince of Orange. "The Allies had, during a short period, obtained success beyond their hopes. This was their auspicious moment. They neglected to improve it. It passed away; and it returned no more.' The Prince of Orange arrested the advance of the French; the weather became stormy, so that the combined fleets could no longer keep the sea; and in short, the Dutch republic obtained a respite* by favour of which the designs of Lewis were very signally foiled. Holland's extremity was his opportunity; but, not being divine after all, the Grand Monarque let it pass. The Earl of Chesterfield, whose diplomatic position interested him in the fortunes of a later Prince of Orange and the Dutch Republic, in his account of the "unjust acrimony" with which "these hot-headed republicans" pushed things to an extremity against the prince, blames the latter for not availing himself more solidly than he did of the affection, or rather the fury, of the people in his favour, when they tumultuously made him Stadthouder,-they in fact, at that moment, desiring nothing better than totally to dissolve the republican form of government. "He should have let them. The tumultuous love of the populace must be seized and enjoyed in its first transports; there is no hoarding of it to use upon occasions; it will not keep. An affected moderation made him lose that moment. The government is now in a disjointed, loose state." H.R.H. should have taken a leaf from Hudibras's book, when Thought he, this is the lucky hour, Wines work when vines are in the flower.‡ Or, to apply the lines of a fertile later bard, who adopted Butler's metre, adapting it to graver themes: It is the very change of tide When best the female heart is tried Pride, prejudice, and modesty, May lightly row his bark to shore.§ Mr. Carlyle is all animation and energy in describing the sudden resolve formed by his favourite Friedrich, on the death of the Kaiser in 1740. "On a sudden, from the opposite side of the horizon, see, miraculous Opportunity, rushing hitherward,-swift, terrible, clothed with lightning like a courser of the gods: dare you clutch him by the thunder * Macaulay's Essays: Sir William Temple. † Some Account of the Government of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces. Hudibras, canto iii. § Scott, Rokeby, canto ii. |