ient; while their
sovereigns, influenced by national feeling, were combining against
Austria. But Austria was a vast military power, and her generals were
the first of their class. The efforts of Europe would then be often
repulsed! This state of affairs prognosticated a long war!--and when at
length it broke out it lasted thirty years! The approach and the
duration of the war might have been predicted; but the period of its
termination could not have been foreseen.

There is, however, a spirit of political vaticination which presumes to
pass beyond the boundaries of human prescience; it has been often
ascribed to the highest source of inspiration by enthusiasts; but since
"the language of prophecy" has ceased, such pretensions are not less
impious than they are unphilosophical. Knox the reformer possessed an
extraordinary portion of this awful prophetic confidence: he appears to
have predicted several remarkable events, and the fates of some persons.
We are told that, condemned to a galley at Rochelle, he predicted that
"within two or three years he should preach the gospel at Saint Giles's
in Edinburgh;" an improbable event, which happened. Of Mary and Darnley,
he pronounced that, "as the king, for the queen's pleasure, had gone to
mass, the Lord, in his justice, would make her the instrument of his
overthrow." Other striking predictions of the deaths of Thomas Maitland,
and of Kirkaldy of Grange, and the warning he solemnly gave to the
Regent Murray not to go to Linlithgow, where he was assassinated,
occasioned a barbarous people to imagine that the prophet Knox had
received an immediate communication from Heaven. A Spanish friar and
almanac-maker predicted, in clear and precise words, the death of Henry
the Fourth of France; and Pieresc, though he had no faith in the vain
science of astrology, yet, alarmed at whatever menaced the life of a
beloved monarch, consulted with some of the king's friends, and had the
Spanish almanac laid before his majesty. That high-spirited monarch
thanked them for their solicitude, but utterly slighted the prediction:
the event occurred, and in the following year the Spanish friar spread
his own fame in a new almanac. I have been occasionally struck at the
Jeremiads of honest George Withers, the vaticinating poet of our civil
wars: some of his works afford many solemn predictions. We may account
for many predictions of this class without the intervention of any
supernatural agency. Amon