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dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the essays had been written within the last twelve months.'*

In moral predictions on individuals, many have discovered the future character. The revolutionary character of Cardinal de Retz, even in his youth, was detected by the sagacity of Mazarine. He then wrote the history of the conspiracy of Fiesco with such vehement admiration of his hero, that the Italian politician, after its perusal, predicted that the young author would be one of the most ⚫ turbulent spirits of the age! The father of Marshal Biron, even amid the glory of his son, discovered the cloud which, invisible to others, was to obscure it. The father, indeed, well knew the fiery passions of his son. 'Biron,' said the domestic seer, I advise thee, when peace takes place, to go and plant cabbages in thy garden, otherwise warn thee, thou wilt lose thy head on a scaffold!' Lo. renzo de Medici had studied the temper of his son Piero; for Guicciardini informs us, that he had often complained to his most intimate friends, that he foresaw the imprudence and arrogance of his son would occasion the ruin of his family. There is a remarkable prediction of James the First, of the evils likely to ensue from Laud's violence, in a conversation given by Hacket, which the king held with Archbishop Williams. When the king was hard pressed to promote Laud, he gave his reasons why he intended to 'keep Laud back from all place of rule and authority, because I find he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain, which endangers the steadfastness of that which is in a good pass. I speak not at random; he hath made himself known to me to be such an one.' James then gives the circumstances to which he alludes; and at length, when, still pursued by the archbishop, then the organ of Buckingham, as usual, this king's good-nature too easily yielded; he did not, however, without closing with this prediction: Then take him to you-but, on my soul, you will repent it! The future character of Cromwell was apparent to two of our great politicians. This coarse unpromising man,' said Lord Falkland, pointing to Cromwell, will be the first person in the kingdom, if the nation comes to blows!' And Archbishop Williams told Charles the First confidentially, that 'There was that in Cromwell which foreboded something dangerous, and wished his majesty would either win him over to him, or get him taken off." The Marquis of Wellesley's incomparable character of Buonaparte predicted his fall when highest in his glory; that great statesman then poured forth the sublime language of philosophical prophecy. His eagerness of power is so inordinate; his jealousy of independence so fierce; his keenness of appetite so feverish in all that touches his ambition, even in the most trifling things, that he must plunge into dreadful difficulties. He is one of an order of minds that by nature make for themselves great reverses.'

Lord Mansfield was once asked, after the commencement of the French revolution, when it would end? His lordship replied, 'It is an event without precedent, and therefore without prognostic. The truth, however, is, that it had both. Our own history had furnished a precedent in the times of Charles the First. And the prognostics were so redundant, that a volume might be collected of passages from various writers who had predicted it. However ingenious might be a history of the Reformation before it occurred, the evidence could not be more authentic and positive than that of the great moral and political revolution which we have witnessed in our own days.

A prediction, which Bishop Butler threw out in a sermon before the House of Lords, in 1741, does honour to his political sagacity, as well as to his knowledge of human nature; he calculated that the irreligious spirit would produce, some time or other, political disorders, similar to those which, in the seventeenth century, had arisen from religious fanaticism. Is there no danger,' he observed, 'that all this may raise somewhat like that levelling spirit, upon atheistical principles, which in the last age prevailed upon enthusiastic ones? Not to speak of the possibility that different sorts of people may unite in it upon these contrary principles! All this literally has been accomplished! Leibnitz, indeed, foresaw the results of those selfish, and at length demoralizing, opinions, which began to prevail through Europe in his day. These disorganizing Biographia Literaria, or Biographical sketches of my Literary Life and Opinious. By S. T. Coleridge, Esq. 1807.Vol., p. 214.

principles, conducted by a political sect, who tried to be worse than they could be,' as old Montaigne expresses it; a sort of men who have been audaciously congratulated as having a taste for evil; exhibited to the astonished world the dismal catastrophe the philosopher had predict ed. I shall give this remarkable passage. I find that certain opinions approaching those of Epicurus and Spinosa, are, little by little, insinuating themselves into the minds of the great rulers of public affairs, who serve as the guides of others, and on whom all matters depend; besides, these opinions are also sliding into fashionable books, and thus they are preparing all things to that general revolution which menaces Europe; destroying those generous sentiments of the ancients, Greek and Roman, which preferred the love of country and public good, and the cares of posterity, to fortune and even to life. Our public spirits," as the English call them, excessively diminish, and are no more in fashion, and will be still less while the least vicious of these men preserve only one principle, which they call honour; a principle which only keeps them from not doing what they deem a low action, while they openly laugh at the love of country-ridicule those who are zealous for public ends-and when a well-intentioned man asks what will become of their posterity? they reply, "Then, as But it may happen to these persons themselves to have to endure those evils which they believe are reserved for others. If this epidemical and intellectual disorder could be corrected, whose bad effects are already visible, those evils might still be prevented; but if i proceeds in its growth, Providence will correct man by the very revolution which must spring from it. Whatever may happen indeed, all must turn out as usual for the best in general at the end of the account, although this cannot happen without the punishment of those who contribute even to the general good by their evil actions. The most superficial reader will hardly require a commentary on this very remarkable passage; he must instantly perceive how Leibnitz, in the seventeenth century, foresaw what has occurred m the eighteenth and the prediction has been verified in the history of the actors in the late revolution, while the result, which we have not perhaps yet had, according to Leibnitz's own exhilarating system of optimism, is an eduction of good from evil.

now!"

A great genius, who was oppressed by malignant rivals in his own times, has been noticed by Madame de Stael, as having left behind him an actual prophecy of the French revolution; this was Guibert, who, in his commentary on Folard's Polybios, published in 1727, declared, that a conspiracy is actually forming in Europe, by means at once so subtile and efficacious, that I am sorry not to have come into the world thirty years later to witness its result. It must be confessed that the sovereigns of Europe wear very bad spectacles. The proofs of it are mathematical, if such proofs ever were, of a conspiracy.' Guibert unquestionably foresaw the anti-monarchical spirit gathering up its mighty wings, and rising over the universe! but could not judge of the nature of the impulse which he predicted; prophesying from the ideas in his luminous intellect, he seems to have been far more curious about, than certain of the consequences. Rousseau even circumstantially predicted the convulsions of modern Europe. He stood on the crisis of the French revolution, which he vividly foresaw, for he seriously advised the higher classes of society to have their children taught some useful trade; a notion highly ridiculed on the first appearance of the Emile; but at its hour the awful truth struck! He, too, foresaw the horrors of that revolution; for he announced that Emile designed to emigrate, because, from the moral state of the people, a virtuous revolution had become impossi ble. The cloquence of Burke was often oracular; and *Public spirit, and public spirits, were about the year 1700 household words with us. Leibnitz was struck by their significance, but it might now puzzle us to find synonyms, or even to explain the very terms themselves.

This extraordinary passage is at the close of the thin! book of Emile, to which I must refer the reader. It is curious, however, to observe, that in 1760 Rousseau poured forth the following awful predictions, which were considered quite ob surd. Vous vous fiez à l'ordre actuel de la société sans songer que cet ordre est sujet à des revolutions inevitable —–— le grand devient petit, le riche devient pauvre, le monarque devient sujet-nous approchons l'état de crise et du siècle, des revolutions Que fera donc dans la bassesse ce satrope que vous n'aurez elevé que pour la grandeur? Que fera dans la pauvreté ce publicain qui ne sealt vivreque d'or? Que fers de pourvu de tout, ce fartueux imbecille qui ne sall point user de luimeme? &c. &c.

LITERATURE.

a speech of Pitt, in 1800, painted the state of Europe as it was only realized fiteen years afterwards.

But many remarkable predictions have turned out to be false. Whenever the facts on which the prediction is raised are altered in their situation, what was relatively true ceases to operate as a general principle. For instance, to that striking anticipation which Rousseau formed of the French revolution, he added, by way of note, as remarkable a prediction on MONARCHY. Je tiens pour impossible que les grandes monarchies de l'Europe aient encore long tems a durer; toutes on brillé, et tout état qui brille est sur son declin. The predominant anti-monarchical spirit among our rising generation seems to hasten on the accomplish ment of the prophecy; but if an important alteration has occurred in the nature of things, we may question the result. If by looking into the past, Rousseau found facts which sufficiently proved that nations in the height of their splendour and corruption had closed their career by falling an easy conquest to barbarous invaders, who annihilated the most polished people at a single blow; we now find that no such power any longer exists in the great family of Europe: the state of the question is therefore changed. It is now how corrupt nations will act against corrupt nations equally enlightened? But if the citizen of Geneva drew his prediction of the extinction of monarchy in Europe from that predilection for democracy which assumes that a republic must necessarily produce more happiness to the people than a monarchy, then we say that the fatal experiment was again repeated since the prediction, and the fact proved not true! The very excess of democracy inevitably terminates in a monarchical state; and were all the monarchies in Europe republics, a philosopher might safely predict the restoration of monarchy! If a prediction be raised on facts which our own prejudices induce us to infer will exist, it must be chimerical. We have an universal Chronicle of the Monk Carion, printed in 1632, in which he announces that the world was about ending, as well as his chronicle of it; that the Turkish empire would not last many years; that after the death of Charles the Fifth the empire of Germany would be torn to pieces by the Germans themselves. This monk will no longer pass for a prophet; he belongs to that class of historians who write to humour their own prejudices, like a certain lady-prophetess, who, in 1811, predicted that grass was to grow in Cheapside about this time! The monk Carion, like others of greater name, had miscalculated the weeks of Daniel, and wished more ill to the Mahometans than sui. the Christian cabinets of Europe to inflict on them; and, lastly, the monastic historian had no notion that it would please Providence to prosper the heresy of Luther! Sir James Macintosh once observed, I am sensible, that in the field of political prediction, veteran sagacity has often been deceived.' 'Sir James alluded to the memorable example of Harrington, who published a demonstration of the impossibility of re. establishing monarchy in England six months before the restoration of Charles the Second. But the author of the Oceana was a political fanatic, who ventured to predict an event, not by other similar events, but by a theoretical principle which he had formed, that the balance of power depends on that of property.' Harrington, in his contracted view of human nature, had dropped out of his calculation all the stirring passions of ambition and party, A similar error of a and the vacillations of the multitude. great genius occurs in De Foe. Child,' says Mr George Chalmers, foreseeing from experience that men's conduct must finally be decided by their principles, foretold the colonial revolt. De Foe, allowing his prejudices to obscure his sagacity, reprobated that suggestion, because he dermed interest a more strenuous prompter than enthusiasm. The predictions of Harrington and De Foe are precisely such as we might expect from a petty calculatora political economist, who can see nothing farther than immediate results; but the true philosophical predictor was Child, who had read the past. It is probable that the American emancipation from the mother-country of England was foreseen, twenty or thirty years before it occurred, though not perhaps by the administration. Lord Orford, writing in 1754 under the ministry of the Duke of Newcastle, blames The instructions to the governor of New York, which seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico, and for a Spanish tribunal, than for a free British settlement, and in such opulence and such haughtiness, that suspicions had long been conceived of their meditating to throw off the dependence on their mother country.' If

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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 ume when Lord Orford wrote this passage pre-
dicted the separation on true and philosophical principles.
Even when the event does not always justify the predi
The catastrophe of human
tion, the predictor may not have been the less correct in
his principles of divination.
Marshal Biron, whom we have noticed, might have as-
life, and the turn of great events, often prove accidental.
cended the throne instead of the scaffold; Cromwell and
the minister of their sovereigns. Fortuitous events are
De Retz might have become only the favourite general, or
not comprehended in the reach of human prescience; such
must be consigned to those vulgar superstitions which pre-
sume to discover the issue of human events, without pre-
There is nothing su-
tending to any human knowledge.
pernatural in the prescience of the philosopher.
Sometimes predictions have been condemned as false
ones, which, when scrutinized, we can scarcely deem to
have failed: they may have been accomplished, and they
In 1749, Dr Hartley published
may again revolve on us.

his Observations on Man and predicted the fall of the
existing governments and hierarchies in two simple pro-
positions; among

others

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

The answer

PROP. 82. It is probable that the present forms of church-government will be dissolved. Many were alarmed at these predicted falls of church Lady Charlotte Wentworth asked Hartley and state. when these terrible things would happen? 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 human events should do! he fixed on the period of its accomplishment. In 1597, he declared that it would Those who 'peradventure fall out to be three-score and ten years, or if strength do awe, into four score! 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 had not yet been completed and were looking with great places on the Restoration, imagined that the prediction 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 hav The period of time was too literally like to remember! ing recurred to it; so easy it seems to forget what we distaken 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 church and state were clearly depicted in his own luminous view.

The philosophical predictor in foretelling a crisis, from of time; for the crisis which he anticipates is calculated the appearances of things, will not rashly assign the period on by that inevitable march of events which generate each other in human affairs; but the period is always dubious, nature incapable of entering into this moral arithmetic. It being either retarded or accelerated by circumstances of a is probable, that revolution, similar to that of France, would ed by the genius of Pitt. In 1618, it was easy to foretell, have occurred in this country, had it not been counteractAt that moment, obby the political prognostics, that a mighty war throughout Europe must necessarily occur. serves Bayle, the house of Austria aimed at an 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 religions, excited a re-action 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 Koox 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 high-spirited monarch thanked them for their solicitude, but utterly slighted the pre-liction; 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 Jeremiads 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

A dark lantherne, offering a dim discovery, intermixed with remembrances, predictions, &c, 1652.

minds have unquestionably exercised. We have discov ered 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 pas sions, all human affairs revolve 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 discri minative, 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 ve nerable Hooker has profoundly observed, that the best things have been overthrown, not so much by puissance and night 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 bas happily expressed the idea.

A new and beautiful light is thus thrown over the annals of mankind, by the analogies and the parallels of dif ferent 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!

DREAMS AT THE DAWN OF PHILOSOPHY.

Modern philosophy, theoretical or experimental, only amuses while the action of discovery is suspended or adcatastrophe is ascertained, as in the romance whose de vances the interest ceases with the inquirer when the nouement turns on a mysterious incident, which, once unfolded, all future agitation ceases. But in the true m fancy of Science, philosophers were as an imaginative a race as poets: marvels and portents, undemonstrable and undefinable, with occult fancies, perpetually beginning and never ending, were delightful as the shifting cantos of Ariosto. Then science entranced the eye by its thaumaturgy when they looked through an optic tube, they believed they were looking into futurity; or, starting at some shadow darkening the glassy globe, beheld the absent person; while the mechanical inventions of art were tors and tricks, with sometimes an automaton, which frightened them with life.

The earlier votaries of modern philosophy only witnessed, as Gaffarel calls his collection, Unheard-of Curiosities." This state of the marvellous, of which we are now for virtuosi in Europe, and with ourselves, long after the estab ever deprived, prevailed among the philosophers and the lishment of the Royal Society. Philosophy then de pended mainly on authority-a single one however was sufficient: so that when this had been repeated by fifty others, they had the authority of fifty honest men-whoever the first man might have been! They were then a blissful race of children, rambling here and there in a golden age of innocence and ignorance, where at every step each gifted discoverer whispered to the few, some half-concealed secret of nature, or played with some toy of art; some invention which with great difficulty per formed what, without it, might have been done with great

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 fore of his own meditation. At this moment, after more pracneal experience in political revolutions, a very intelligent French writer in a pamphlet, entitled 'M. de Villele," says Expe rience proclaims a great truth-namely, that revolutions them. selves 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.

ease. The cabinets of the lovers of mechanical arts formed enchanted apartments, where the admirers feared to stir or look about them; while the philosophers themselves half imagined they were the very thaumaturgi, for which the world gave them too much credit, at least for their quiet! Would we run after the shadows in this gleaming land of moonshine, or sport with these children in the fresh morning of science, ere Aurora had scarcely peeped on the hills, we must enter into their feelings, view with their eyes, and believe all they confide to us; and out of these bundles of dreams sometimes pick out one or two for our own dreaming. They are the fairy tales and the Arabian nights' entertainments of Science. But if the reader is stubbornly mathematical and logical, he will only be holding up a great torch against the muslin curtain, upon which the fantastic shadows playing upon it must vanish at the instant. It is an amusement which can only take place by carefully keeping himself in the dark.

such great character should write so absurdly on his vanishing at his death, nobody knows how! But as it is probable that Monsieur and Mademoiselle must have generated some puppy demons, Wierus ought to have been more circumstantial.

Albertus Magnus, for thirty years, had never ceased working at a man of brass, and had cast together the qualities of his materials under certain constellations, which threw such a spirit into his man of brass, that it was reported his growth was visible; his feet, legs, thighs, shoulders, neck, and head, expanded, and made the city of Cologne uneasy at possessing one citizen too mighty for them all. This man of brass, when he reached his maturity, was so loquacious, that Albert's master, the great scholastic Thomas Aquinas, one day, tired of his babble, and declaring it was a devil, or devilish, with his staff knocked the head off; and, what was extraordinary, this brazen man, like any human being thus effectually silenced, 'word never spake more.' This incident is equally historical and authentic; though whether heads of brass can speak, and even prophecy, was indeed a subject of profound inquiry, even at a later period. Naude, who never questioned their vocal powers, and yet was puzzled concerning the nature of this new species of animal, has no doubt most judiciously stated the question, whether these speaking brazen heads had a sensitive and reasoning nature, or whether demons spoke in them? But brass has not the

plants, and therefore they were not sensitive; and as for the act of reasoning, these brazen heads presumed to know nothing but the future: with the past and the present they seemed totally unacquainted, so that their memory and their observation were very limited; and as for the future, that is always doubtful and obscure-even to heads of brass! This learned man then infers, that These brazen heads could have no reasoning faculties, for nothing altered their nature; they said what they had to say, which no one could contradict; and having said their say, you might have broken the head for any thing more that you could have got out of it. Had they had any life in them, would they not have moved, as well as spoken? Life itself is but motion, but they had no lungs, no spleen; and, in fact, though they spoke, they had no tongue. Was a devil in them? I think not. Yet why should men have taken all this trouble to make, not a man, but a trumpet?'

Our profound philosopher was right not to agitate the question whether these brazen heads had ever spoken? Why should not a man of brass speak, since a doll can whisper, a statue play chess, and brass ducks have per formed the whole process of digestion? Another magical invention has been ridiculed with equal reason.

A ma

What a subject, were I to enter on it, would be the narratives of inagical writers! These precious volumes have been so constantly wasted by the profane, that now a book of real magic requires some to find it, as well as a magician to use it. Albertus Magnus, or Albert the Great, as he is erroneously styled-for this sage only derived this enviable epithet from his surname De Groot, as did Hugo Grotius-this sage, in his Admirable Secrets' delivers his opinion that these books of magic should be most pre-faculty of providing its own nourishment, as we see in ciously preserved; for, he prophetically added, the time is arriving when they would be understood! It seems they were not intelligible in the thirteenth century; but, if Albertus has not miscalculated, in the present day they may be! Magical terms with talismanic figures may yet conceal many a secret; gunpowder came down to us in a sort of anagram, and the kaleidoscope, with all its interminable muluplications of forms, lay at hand, for two centuries, in Baptista Porta's Natural Magic.' The abbot Truthemius, in a confidential letter, happened to call himself a magician, perhaps at the moment he thought himself one, and sent three or four leaves stuffed with the names of devils, and with their evocations. At the death of his friend these leaves fell into the unwary bands of the Prior, who was so frightened on the first glance at the diabolical nomenclature, that he raised the country against the abbot, and Trithemius was nearly a lost man! Yet, after all, this evocation of devils has reached us in his Steganographia,' and proves to be only one of this ingenious abbor's polygraphic attempts at secret writing; for he had flattered himself that he had invented a mode of concealing his thoughts from all the world, while he communicated them to a friend. Roger Bacon promised to raise thunder and lightning, and disperse clouds, by dis-gician was annoyed, as philosophers still are, by passengers solving them into rain. The first magical process has in the street; and he, particularly so, by having horses led been obtained by Franklin; and the other, of far more use to drink under his window. He made a magical horse of to our agriculturists, may perchance be found lurking in wood, according to one of the books of Hermes, which some corner which has been overlooked in the Opus maperfectly answered its purpose, frightening away the hor jus' of our Doctor mirabilis.' Do we laugh at their mases, or rather the grooms! the wooden horse, no doubt, gical works of art? Are we ourselves such indifferent gave some palpable kick. The same magical story might artists? Cornelius Agrippa, before he wrote his Vanity have been told of Dr Franklin, who finding that under his of the Arts and Sciences,' intended to reduce into a syswindow the passengers had discovered a spot which they tem and method the secret of communicating with spirits made too convenient for themselves, he charged it with his and demons. On good authority, that of Porphyrius, Pselnewlydiscovered electrical fire. After a few remarkable incilus, Plotinus, Jamblicus-and on better, were it necessary dents had occurred, which at a former period had lodged the to allege it he was well assured that the upper regions great discoverer of electricity in the Inquisition, the modern of the air swarm with what the Greeks called dæmones, magician succeeded just as well as the ancient, who had just as our lower atmosphere is full of birds, our waters of the advantage of conning over the books of Hermes. Instead fish, and our earth of insects. Yet this occult philosopher, of ridiculing these works of magic, let us rather become who knew perfectly eight languages, and married two magicians ourselves! wives, with whom he had never exchanged a harsh word in any of them, was every where avoided as having by his side, for his companion, a personage no less than a demon! This was a great black dog whom he suffered to stretch himself out among his magical manuscripts, or lie on his bed, often kissing and patting him, and feeding him on choice morsels. Yet for this would Paulus Jovius and all the world have had him put to the ordeal of fire and faggot! The truth was afterwards boldly asserted by Wierus, his learned domestic, who believed that his master's dog was really nothing more than what he appeared! 'I bebere,' says he, that he was a real natural dog; he was indeed black, but of a moderate size, and I have often led hirn by a string, and called him by the French name Agrippa had given him, Monsieur! and he had a female who was called Mademoiselle! I wonder how authors of

The works of the ancient alchemists have afforded numberless discoveries to modern chemists: nor is even their grand operation despaired of. If they have of late not been so renowned, this has arisen from a want of what Ashmole calls apertness;' a qualification early inculcated among these illuminated sages. We find authentic accounts of some who have lived three centuries, with tolerable complexions, possessed of nothing but a crucible and a bellows! but they were so unnecessarily mysterious, that whenever such a person was discovered, he was sure in an instant to disappear, and was never afterwards heard of.

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all along impressed on the student, for the accomplish In the Liber Patris Sapientia' this selfish cautiousness ment of the great mystery. In the commentary on this precious work of the alchemist Norton who counsels,

'Be thou in a place secret, by thyself alone,

That no man see or hear what thou shalt say or done. Trust not thy friend too much wheresoe'er thou go, For he thou trustest best, somety me may be thy foe.' Ashmole observes, that Norton gives exceeding good advice to the student in this science where he bids him be secret in the carrying on of his studies and operations, and not to let any one know of his undertakings but his good angel and himself; and such a close and retired breast had Norton's master, who,

When men disputed of colours of the rose,

He would not speak, but kept himself full close!' We regret that by each leaving all his knowledge to 'his good angel and himself, it has happened that the good angels,' have kept it all to themselves!

It cannot, however, be denied, that if they could not always extract gold out of lead, they sometimes succeeded in washing away the pimples on ladies' faces, notwithstanding that Sir Kenelm Digby poisoned his most beautiful lady, because, as Sancho would have said, he was one of those who would have his bread whiter than the finest wheaten.' Van Helmont, who could not succeed in discovering the true elixir of life, however hit on the spirit of hartshorn, which for a good while he considered was the wonderful elixir itself, restoring to life persons who seemed to have lost it. And though this delightful enthusiast could not raise a ghost, yet he thought he had; for he rated something aerial from spa-water, which mistaking for a ghost, he gave it that very name; a name which we still retain in gas, from the German geist, or ghost! Paracelsus carried the tiny spirits about him in the hilt of his great sword! Having first discovered the qualities of Jaudanum, this illustrious quack made use of it as an universal remedy; and distributed, in the form of pills, which he carried in the basket-hilt of his sword; the operations he performed were as rapid as they seemed magical. Doubtless we have lost some inconceivable secrets by some unexpected occurrences, which the secret itself, it would seem, ought to have prevented taking place. When a philosopher had discovered the art of prolonging life to an indefinite period, it is most provoking to find that he should have allowed himself to die at an early age! We have a very authentic history from Sir Kenelm Digby himself, that when he went in disguise to visit Descartes at his retirement at Egmond, lamenting the brevity of life, which hindered philosophers getting on in their studies, the French philosopher assured him that he had considered that matter; to render a man immortal was what he could not promise, but that he was very sure it was possible to lengthen out his life to the period of the patriarchs.' And when his death was announced to the world, the abbé Picot, an ardent disciple, for a long time would not believe it

possible; and at length insisted, that if it had occurred, it must have been owing to some mistake of the philosophers,

The late Holcroft, Loutherbourgh, and Cosway, imagined that they should escape the vulgar era of scriptural life by reorganizing their old bones, and moistening their dry marrow; their new principles of vitality were supposed by them to be found in the powers of the mind; this seemed more reasonable, but proved to be as little efficacious as those other philosophers who imagine they have detected the hidden principle of life in the cels frisking in vinegar, and allude to the book-binder who creates the book-worm!!

Paracelsus has revealed to us one of the grandest seerets of nature, When the world began to dispute on the very existence of the elementary folk, it was then that he boldly offered to give birth to a fairy, and has sent down to posterity the recipe. He describes the impurity which is to be transmuted into such purity, the gross elements of a delicate fairy, which, fixed in a phial, placed in fuming dung, will in due time settle into a full-grown fairy, bursting through its vitreous prison-on the vivifying principle by which the ancient Egvotians hatched their eggs in ovens. I recollect at Dr Farmer's sale the leaf which preserved this recipe for making a fairy, forcibly folded down by the learned commentator; from which we must infer the credit he gave to the experiment. There was a greatness of mind in Paracelsus, who, having furnished @reeing to make a fairy, had the delicacy to refrain from Batista Porta, one of the most enlightened does not deny the possibility of engendering at their full growth shall not exceed the

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size of a mouse:' but he adds they are only pretty little dogs to play with.' Were these akin to the faries of Paracelsus?

They were well convinced of the existence of such elemental beings; frequent accidents in mines showed the potency of the metallic spirits; which so tormented the workmen in some of the German mines, by blindness, giddiness, and sudden sickness, that they have been obliged to abandon mines well known to be rich in silver. A metallic spirit at one sweep annihilated twelve miners, who were all found dead together. The fact was unquestionable; and the safety-lamp was undiscovered!

Never was a philosophical imagination more beautiful than that exquisite Palingenesis, as it has been termed from the Greek, or a regeneration; or rather, the apparitions of animals and plants. Schott, Kircher, Gaffarel, Borelli, Digby, and the whole of that admirable school, discovered in the ashes of plants their primitive forms, which were again raised up by the force of heat. Nothing, they say, perishes in nature; all is but a continuation, or a revival. The semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of man; the ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been planted: unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew on rose-trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment! The process of the Palingenesis, this picture of immortality, is described. These philoso phers having burst a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it; till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower, arise: it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes. The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable phoenix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes, till the presence of heat produces this resurrection-in its absence it returns to its death. Thus the dead naturally revive; and a corpse may give out its shadowy reanimation, when not too deeply buried in the earth. Bodies corrupted in their graves have risen, particularly the murdered; for murderers are apt to bury their victims in a slight and hasty manner, Their salts, exhaled in vapour by means of their fermentation, have arranged themselves on the surface of the earth, and formed those phantoms, which at night have often terrified the passing spectator, as authentic history witnesses. They have opened the graves of the phantom, and discovered the bleeding corpse

beneath; hence it is astonishing how many ghosts may be

seen at night after a recent battle, standing over their corpses! On the same principle, my old philosopher Gaffarel conjectures on the raining of frogs; but these frogs, we must conceive, can only be the ghosts of frogs; and Gaffarel himself has modestly opened this fact by a peradventure. A more satisfactory origin of ghosts modern philosophy has not afforded.

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And who does not believe in the existence of ghosts? for, as Dr More forcibly says, That there should be sa universal a fame and fear of that which never was, nor is, nor can be ever in the world, is to me the greatest miracle of all. If there had not been, at some time or other, trua miracles, it had not been so easy to impose on the people by false. The alchemist would never go about to sophisti cate metals to pass them off for true gold and silver, unless that such a thing was acknowledged as true gold and silver in the world.'"

The Pharmacopoeia of those times combined more of morals with medicine than our own. They discovered that the agate rendered a man eloquent and even withy; a laurel leaf placed on the centre of the skull, fortified the memory; the brains of fowls, and birds of swift wing, wonderfully helped the imagination. All such specifics have not disappeared, and have greatly reduced the chances of an invalid recovering, that which perhaps he never possessed. Lentils and rape seed were a certain cure for the small pox, and very obviously, their grains resembling the spots of this disease. They discovered that those who lived on fair plants became fair, these on fruitful ones were never barren: on the principle that Hercules acquired his mighty strength by feeding on the

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