o him a great
encouragement to invade the lande. He had not else done it so sodeinely.
But he was most fowly deceived, as all they are and shall be that put
their trust in such dark drowsye dreames of hipocrites. The king therefore
commended that he should be hanged up, and his sonne also with him, lest
any more false prophets should arise of that race."

Heywood, who was a great stickler for the truth of all sorts of
prophecies, gives a much more favourable account of this Peter of Pomfret,
or Pontefract, whose fate he would, in all probability, have shared, if he
had had the misfortune to have flourished in the same age. He says, that
Peter, who was not only a prophet, but a bard, predicted divers of King
John's disasters, which fell out accordingly. On being taxed for a lying
prophet in having predicted that the king would be deposed before he
entered into the fifteenth year of his reign, he answered him boldly, that
all he had said was justifiable and true; for that, having given up his
crown to the pope, and paying him an annual tribute, the pope reigned, and
not he. Heywood thought this explanation to be perfectly satisfactory, and
the prophet's faith for ever established.

But to return to Merlin. Of him even to this day it may be said, in the
words which Burns has applied to another notorious personage,

"Great was his power and great his fame;
Far kenned and noted is his name."

His reputation is by no means confined to the land of his birth, but
extends through most of the nations of Europe. A very curious volume of
his _Life, Prophecies, and Miracles_, written, it is supposed, by Robert
de Bosron, was printed at Paris in 1498, which states, that the devil
himself was his father, and that he spoke the instant he was born, and
assured his mother, a very virtuous young woman, that she should not die
in childbed with him, as her ill-natured neighbours had predicted. The
judge of the district, hearing of so marvellous an occurrence, summoned
both mother and child to appear before him; and they went accordingly the
same day. To put the wisdom of the young prophet most effectually to the
test, the judge asked him if he knew his own father? To which the infant
Merlin replied, in a clear, sonorous voice, "Yes, my father is the Devil;
and I have his power, and know all things, past, present, and to come."
His worship clapped his hands in astonishment, and took the prudent
resolution of not molesting so awful