ardly
ever undertook any affair of importance without consulting them. She
chiefly favoured her own countrymen; and during the time she governed
France, the land was overrun by Italian conjurors, necromancers, and
fortune-tellers of every kind. But the chief astrologer of that day,
beyond all doubt, was the celebrated Nostradamus, physician to her
husband, King Henry II. He was born in 1503 at the town of St. Remi, in
Provence, where his father was a notary. He did not acquire much fame till
he was past his fiftieth year, when his famous _Centuries_, a collection
of verses, written in obscure and almost unintelligible language, began to
excite attention. They were so much spoken of in 1556, that Henry II.
resolved to attach so skilful a man to his service, and appointed him his
physician. In a biographical notice of him, prefixed to the edition of his
_Vraies Centuries_, published at Amsterdam in 1668, we are informed that
he often discoursed with his royal master on the secrets of futurity, and
received many great presents as his reward, besides his usual allowance
for medical attendance. After the death of Henry he retired to his native
place, where Charles IX. paid him a visit in 1564; and was so impressed
with veneration for his wondrous knowledge of the things that were to be,
not in France only, but in the whole world for hundreds of years to come,
that he made him a counsellor of state and his own physician, besides
treating him in other matters with a royal liberality. "In fine,"
continues his biographer, "I should be too prolix were I to tell all the
honours conferred upon him, and all the great nobles and learned men that
arrived at his house from the very ends of the earth, to see and converse
with him as if he had been an oracle. Many strangers, in fact, came to
France for no other purpose than to consult him."

[Illustration: NOSTRADAMUS.--FROM THE FRONTISPIECE TO A COLLECTION OF HIS
PROPHECIES, PUBLISHED AT AMSTERDAM, A.D. 1666.]

The prophecies of Nostradamus consist of upwards of a thousand stanzas,
each of four lines, and are to the full as obscure as the oracles of old.
They take so great a latitude, both as to time and space, that they are
almost sure to be fulfilled somewhere or other in the course of a few
centuries. A little ingenuity, like that evinced by Lilly in his
explanation about General Monk and the dreadful dead man, might easily
make events to fit some of them.[58]

[58] Let us try.