g the busy spirits of a revolutionary age, the
heads of a party, such as Knox, have frequently secret communications
with spies or with friends. In a constant source of concealed
information, a shrewd, confident, and enthusiastic temper will find
ample matter for mysterious prescience. Knox exercised that deep
sagacity which took in the most enlarged views of the future, as appears
by his Machiavelian foresight on the barbarous destruction of the
monasteries and the cathedrals--"The best way to keep the _rooks_ from
returning, is to pull down their _nests_." In the case of the prediction
of the death of Henry the Fourth, by the Spanish friar, it resulted
either from his being acquainted with the plot, or from his being made
an instrument for their purpose by those who were. It appears that
rumours of Henry's assassination were rife in Spain and Italy before the
event occurred. Such vaticinators as George Withers will always rise in
those disturbed times which his own prosaic metre has forcibly
depicted:--

It may be on that darkness, which they find
Within their hearts, a sudden light hath shin'd,
Making reflections of SOME THINGS TO COME,
Which leave within them musings troublesome
To their weak spirits; or too intricate
For them to put in order, and relate.
They act as men in ecstasies have done--
Striving their cloudy visions to declare--
And I, perhaps, among these may be one
That was let loose for service to be done:
I blunder out what worldly-prudent men
Count madnesse.--P. 7.[195]

Separating human prediction from inspired prophecy, we only ascribe to
the faculties of man that acquired prescience which we have demonstrated
that some great minds have unquestionably exercised. We have discovered
its principles in the necessary dependence of effects on general causes,
and we have shown that, impelled by the same motives, and circumscribed
by the same passions, all human affairs revolve in a circle; and we
have opened the true source of this yet imperfect science of moral and
political prediction, in an intimate but a discriminative knowledge of
the PAST.

Authority is sacred, when experience affords parallels and analogies. If
much which may overwhelm when it shall happen can be foreseen, the
prescient statesman and moralist may provide defensive measures to break
the waters, whose streams they cannot always direct; and the venerable
Hooker has profoundly observed, that "the best thing