hile they are
withdrawn from their conflicting interests, have rarely been confounded
by the astonishment which overwhelms those who, absorbed in active life,
are the mere creatures of sensation, agitated by the shadows of truth,
the unsubstantial appearances of things! Intellectual nations are
advancing in an eternal circle of events and passions which succeed each
other, and the last is necessarily connected with its antecedent; the
solitary force of some fortuitous incident only can interrupt this
concatenated progress of human affairs.

That every great event has been accompanied by a presage or prognostic,
has been observed by Lord Bacon. "The shepherds of the people should
understand the _prognostics of state tempests_; hollow blasts of wind
seemingly at a distance, and secret swellings of the sea, often precede
a storm." Such were the prognostics discerned by the politic Bishop
Williams in Charles the First's time, who clearly foresaw and predicted
the final success of the Puritanic party in our country: attentive to
his own security, he abandoned the government and sided with the rising
opposition, at the moment when such a change in public affairs was by no
means apparent.[179]

In this spirit of foresight our contemplative antiquary Dugdale must
have anticipated the scene which was approaching in 1641, in the
destruction of our ancient monuments in cathedral churches. He hurried
on his itinerant labours of taking draughts and transcribing
inscriptions, as he says, "to preserve them for future and better
times." Posterity owes to the prescient spirit of Dugdale the ancient
Monuments of England, which bear the marks of the haste, as well as the
zeal, which have perpetuated them.

Continental writers formerly employed a fortunate expression, when they
wished to have an _Historia Reformationis ante Reformationem_: this
history of the Reformation would have commenced at least a century
before the Reformation itself! A letter from Cardinal Julian to Pope
Eugenius the Fourth, written a century before Luther appeared, clearly
predicts the Reformation and its consequences. He observed that the
minds of men were ripe for something tragical; he felt the axe striking
at the root, and the tree beginning to bend, and that his party, instead
of propping it, were hastening its fall.[180] In England, Sir Thomas
More was not less prescient in his views; for when his son Roper was
observing to him that the Catholic religion,