this principle. "It
would be possible," says the eloquent writer, "to frame a table or chart
in which all the given imaginable events of the history of a people
would be reduced to a mathematical exactness." The conception is
fanciful, but its foundation lies deep in truth.

A remarkable illustration of the secret principle divulged by Aristotle,
and described by Thucydides, appears in the recent confession of a man
of genius among ourselves. When Mr. Coleridge was a political writer in
the _Morning Post_ and _Courier_, at a period of darkness and utter
confusion, that writer was then conducted by a tract of light, not
revealed to ordinary journalists, on the Napoleonic empire. "Of that
despotism in masquerade" he decided by "the state of Rome under the
first Caesars;" and of the Spanish American Revolution, by taking the war
of the United Provinces with Philip the Second as the groundwork of the
comparison. "On every great occurrence," he says, "I endeavoured to
discover, in PAST HISTORY the event that most nearly resembled it. I
procured the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers.
Then fairly subtracting the points of _difference_ from those of
_likeness_, as the balance favoured the former or the latter, I
conjectured that the result would be the same or different. In the
essays 'On the Probable Final Restoration of the Bourbons,' I feel
myself authorised to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent
men, that were the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the
essays had been written within the last twelve months."[189]

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 Mazarin. 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 I warn thee, thou wilt lose thy head
on the scaffold!" Lorenzo de' Medici had studied the temper of his son
Piero; for Guicciardini informs