off the dependence on their mother-country." If this was written at the time, as the author asserts, it is a very remarkable passage, observes the noble editor of his memoirs. The prognostics or presages of this revolution it may now be difficult to recover; but it is evident that Child, before the time when Lord Orford wrote this passage, predicted the separation on true and philosophical principles.

Even when the event does not always justify the prediction, the predictor may not have been the less correct in his principles of divination. The catastrophe of human life, and the turn of great events, often prove accidental. Marshal Biron, whom we have noticed, might have ascended the throne instead of the scaffold; Cromwell and De Retz might have become only the favourite general or the minister of their sovereigns. Fortuitous events are not comprehended in the reach of human prescience; such must be consigned to those vulgar superstitions which presume to discover the issue of human events, without pretending to any human knowledge. There is nothing supernatural in the prescience of the philosopher.

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Sometimes predictions have been condemned as false ones, which, when scrutinised, we can scarcely deem to have failed they may have been accomplished, and they may again revolve on us. In 1749 Dr. Hartley published his "Observations on Man," and predicted the fall of the existing governments and hierarchies in two simple propositions ; among others

Prop. 81. It is probable that all the civil governments will be overturned.

Prop. 82. It is probable that the present forms of churchgovernment will be dissolved.

Many were alarmed at these predicted falls of church and state. Lady Charlotte Wentworth asked Hartley when these terrible things would happen. The answer of the predictor was not less awful: "I am an old man, and shall not live to see them; but you are a young woman, and probably will see them." In the subsequent revolutions of America and of France, and perhaps now of Spain, we can hardly deny that these predictions had failed. A fortuitous event has once more thrown back Europe into its old corners but we still revolve in a circle, and what is now dark and remote may again come round, when time has performed its great cycle. There was a prophetical passage in Hooker's

Ecclesiastical Polity regarding the church which long occupied the speculations of its expounders. Hooker indeed seemed to have done what no predictor of events should do; he fixed on the period of its accomplishment. In 1597 he declared that it would "peradventure fall out to be threescore and ten years, or if strength do awe, into fourscore." Those who had outlived the revolution in 1641, when the long parliament pulled down the ecclesiastical establishment, and sold the church-lands—a circumstance which Hooker had contemplated—and were afterwards returned to their places on the Restoration, imagined that the prediction had not yet been completed, and were looking with great anxiety towards the year 1677, for the close of this extraordinary prediction! When Bishop Barlow, in 1675, was consulted on it, he endeavoured to dissipate the panic, by referring to an old historian, who had reproached our nation for their proneness to prophecies!* The prediction of the venerable Hooker in truth had been fully accomplished, and the event had occurred without Bishop Barlow having recurred to it; so easy it seems to forget what we dislike to remember! The period of time was too literally taken, and seems to have been only the figurative expression of man's age in scriptural language which Hooker had employed; but no one will now deny that this prescient sage had profoundly foreseen the results of that rising party, whose designs on ehurch and state were clearly depicted in his own luminous view.

The philosophical predictor, in foretelling a crisis from the appearance of things, will not rashly assign the period of time; for the crisis which he anticipates is calculated on by that inevitable march of events which generate each other in human affairs; but the period is always dubious, being either retarded or accelerated by circumstances of a nature incapable of entering into this moral arithmetic. It is probable that a revolution similar to that of France would have occurred in this country, had it not been counteracted by the genius of Pitt. In 1618 it was easy to foretell by the political prognostics that a mighty war throughout Europe must neces

An eye-witness of the great fire of London has noted the difficulty of obtaining effective assistance in endeavouring to stay its progress, owing to the superstition which seized many persons, because a prophecy of Mother Shipton's was quoted to show that London was doomed to hopeless and entire destruction.

sarily occur. At that moment, observes Bayle, the house of Austria aimed at a universal monarchy; the consequent domineering spirit of the ministers of the Emperor and the King of Spain, combined with their determination to exterminate the new religion, excited a reaction to this imperial despotism public opinion had been suppressed, till every people grew impatient; while their sovereigns, influenced by national feeling, were combining against Austria. But Austria was a vast military power, and her generals were the first of their class. The efforts of Europe would then be often repulsed! This state of affairs prognosticated a long war!-and when at length it broke out it lasted thirty years! The approach and the duration of the war might have been predicted; but the period of its termination could not have

been foreseen.

There is, however, a spirit of political vaticination which presumes to pass beyond the boundaries of human prescience; it has been often ascribed to the highest source of inspiration by enthusiasts; but since "the language of prophecy" has ceased, such pretensions are not less impious than they are unphilosophical. Knox the reformer possessed an extraordinary portion of this awful prophetic confidence: he appears to have predicted several remarkable events, and the fates of some persons. We are told that, condemned to a galley at Rochelle, he predicted that "within two or three years he should preach the gospel at Saint Giles's in Edinburgh;" an improbable event, which happened. Of Mary and Darnley, he pronounced that, "as the king, for the queen's pleasure, had gone to mass, the Lord, in his justice, would make her the instrument of his overthrow." Other striking predictions of the deaths of Thomas Maitland, and of Kirkaldy of Grange, and the warning he solemnly gave to the Regent Murray not to go to Linlithgow, where he was assassinated, occasioned a barbarous people to imagine that the prophet Knox had received an immediate communication from Heaven. A Spanish friar and almanac-maker predicted, in clear and precise words, the death of Henry the Fourth of France; and Pieresc, though he had no faith in the vain science of astrology, yet, alarmed at whatever menaced the life of a beloved monarch, consulted with some of the king's friends, and had the Spanish almanac laid before his majesty. That highspirited monarch thanked them for their solicitude, but utterly slighted the prediction: the event occurred, and in

the following year
the Spanish friar spread his own fame in a
new almanac. I have been occasionally struck at the Jere-
miads of honest George Withers, the vaticinating poet of our
civil wars: some of his works afford many solemn predictions.
We may account for many predictions of this class without
the intervention of any supernatural agency. Among the
busy spirits of a revolutionary age, the heads of a party, such
as Knox, have frequently secret communications with spies or
with friends. In a constant source of concealed information,
a shrewd, confident, and enthusiastic temper will find ample
matter for mysterious prescience. Knox exercised that deep
sagacity which took in the most enlarged views of the future,
as appears by his Machiavelian foresight on the barbarous
destruction of the monasteries and the cathedrals-" The best
way to keep the rooks from returning, is to pull down their
nests." In the case of the prediction of the death of Henry
the Fourth, by the Spanish friar, it resulted either from his
being acquainted with the plot, or from his being made an
instrument for their purpose by those who were.
It appears
that rumours of Henry's assassination were rife in Spain and
Italy before the event occurred. Such vaticinators as George
Withers will always rise in those disturbed times which his
own prosaic metre has forcibly depicted:-

It may be on that darkness, which they find
Within their hearts, a sudden light hath shin'd,
Making reflections of SOME THINGS TO COME,
Which leave within them musings troublesome
To their weak spirits; or too intricate
For them to put in order, and relate.
They act as men in ecstasies have done-
Striving their cloudy visions to declare-
And I, perhaps, among these may be one
That was let loose for service to be done :
I blunder out what worldly-prudent men
Count madnesse.-P. 7.*

Separating human prediction from inspired prophecy, we only ascribe to the faculties of man that acquired prescience which we have demonstrated that some great minds have unquestionably exercised. We have discovered its principles in the necessary dependence of effects on general causes, and we have shown that, impelled by the same motives, and circumscribed by the same passions, all human affairs revolve

* "A Dark Lantherne, offering a dim Discovery, intermixed with Remembrances, Predictions, &c. 1652."

in a circle; and we have opened the true source of this yet imperfect science of moral and political prediction, in an intimate but a discriminative knowledge of the PAST.

Authority is sacred, when experience affords parallels and analogies. If much which may overwhelm when it shall happen can be foreseen, the prescient statesman and moralist may provide defensive measures to break the waters, whose streams they cannot always direct; and the venerable Hooker has profoundly observed, that "the best things have been overthrown, not so much by puissance and might of adversaries, as through defect of council in those that should have upheld and defended the same." *

The philosophy of history blends the past with the present, and combines the present with the future: each is but a portion of the other! The actual state of a thing is necessarily determined by its antecedent, and thus progressively through the chain of human existence; while "the present is always full of the future," as Leibnitz has happily expressed the idea.

A new and beautiful light is thus thrown over the annals of mankind, by the analogies and the parallels of different ages in succession. How the seventeenth century has influenced the eighteenth; and the results of the nineteenth as they shall appear in the twentieth, might open a source of predictions, to which, however difficult it might be to affix their dates, there would be none in exploring into causes, and tracing their inevitable effects.

The multitude live only among the shadows of things in the appearances of the PRESENT; the learned, busied with the PAST, can only trace whence and how all comes; but he who is one of the people, and one of the learned, the true philosopher, views the natural tendency and terminations which are preparing for the FUTURE!

* Hooker wrote this about 1560, and he wrote before the Siècle des Révolutions had begun, even among ourselves! He penetrated into this important principle merely by the force of his own meditation. At this moment, after more practical experience in political revolutions, a very intelligent French writer, in a pamphlet, entitled "M. da Villèle," says, "Experience proclaims a great truth-namely, that revolutions themselves cannot succeed, except when they are favoured by a portion of the GOVERNMENT." He illustrates the axiom by the different revolutions which have occurred in his nation within these thirty years. It is the same truth, traced to its source by another road.