ad long been conceived
of their meditating to throw off the dependence on their
mother-country_." If 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 time
when Lord Orford wrote this passage, predicted the separation on true
and philosophical principles.

Even when the event does not always justify the prediction, the
predictor may not have been the less correct in his principles of
divination. The catastrophe of human life, and the turn of great events,
often prove accidental. Marshal Biron, whom we have noticed, might have
ascended the throne instead of the scaffold; Cromwell and De Retz might
have become only the favourite general or the minister of their
sovereigns. Fortuitous events are not comprehended in the reach of human
prescience; such must be consigned to those vulgar superstitions which
presume to discover the issue of human events, without pretending to any
human knowledge. There is nothing supernatural in the prescience of the
philosopher.

Sometimes predictions have been condemned as false ones, which, when
scrutinised, we can scarcely deem to have failed: they may have been
accomplished, and they may again revolve on us. In 1749 Dr. Hartley
published his "Observations on Man," and predicted the fall of the
existing governments and hierarchies in two simple propositions; among
others--

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

Prop. 82. It is probable that the present forms of church-government
will be dissolved.

Many were alarmed at these predicted falls of church and state. Lady
Charlotte Wentworth asked Hartley when these terrible things would
happen. The answer 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