do not lay the fault to, right or wrong, that we may have
something to quarrel with? It is not those beautiful tresses you tear,
nor is it the white bosom that in your anger you so unmercifully beat,
that with an unlucky bullet have slain your beloved brother; quarrel with
something else. Livy, speaking of the Roman army in Spain, says that for
the loss of the two brothers, their great captains:

"Flere omnes repente, et offensare capita."

["All at once wept and tore their hair."-Livy, xxv. 37.]

'Tis a common practice. And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the
king, who by handsful pulled his hair off his head for sorrow, "Does this
man think that baldness is a remedy for grief?"--[Cicero, Tusc. Quest.,
iii. 26.]--Who has not seen peevish gamesters chew and swallow the
cards, and swallow the dice, in revenge for the loss of their money?
Xerxes whipped the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos; Cyrus
employed a whole army several days at work, to revenge himself of the
river Gyndas, for the fright it had put him into in passing over it; and
Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother
had once enjoyed there.

--[Pleasure--unless 'plaisir' were originally 'deplaisir'--must be
understood here ironically, for the house was one in which she had
been imprisoned.--Seneca, De Ira. iii. 22]--

I remember there was a story current, when I was a boy, that one of our
neighbouring kings--[Probably Alfonso XI. of Castile]--having received
a blow from the hand of God, swore he would be revenged, and in order to
it, made proclamation that for ten years to come no one should pray to
Him, or so much as mention Him throughout his dominions, or, so far as
his authority went, believe in Him; by which they meant to paint not so
much the folly as the vainglory of the nation of which this tale was
told. They are vices that always go together, but in truth such actions
as these have in them still more of presumption than want of wit.
Augustus Caesar, having been tossed with a tempest at sea, fell to
defying Neptune, and in the pomp of the Circensian games, to be revenged,
deposed his statue from the place it had amongst the other deities.
Wherein he was still less excusable than the former, and less than he was
afterwards when, having lost a battle under Quintilius Varus in Germany,
in rage and despair he went running his head against the wall, crying
out, "O Varus