certainly, to meet very varied modes of
fulfilment. Hartley, in his Observations
on Man, said: "It is probable that all
the civil governments will be overturned;
and that the present forms of church government
will be dissolved;" leaving the year
and even the century quite undetermined.
The mother of the first Napoleon, Madame
Letitia Buonaparte, when the star of the
house had sunk, often expressed a
confidence that her grandson would one day be
emperor; but it was known that the son
of Napoleon was the youth whom she had
in her thoughts, and not the son of Louis,
who is now emperor. A manuscript of old
date says that

When time shall come that M and D
With its own fift shall joyned be,
And followed by an X and C,
Then Britain shall tremble at the Blue Lilly.

Ominous, this; but then, while one
interpreter makes it out to mean the year 1660,
another prefers 1900. An old almanack is
said (though we know not on what authority)
to contain the prediction:

By the pow'rs to see through the ways of Heaven,
In eighteen hundred and thirty-seven,
Shall the year pass away without any spring,
And on England's throne shall not sit a king.

Only half true, at most, seeing that William
the Fourth reigned in the first half of that
year. The Caledonian Mercury stated,
some years ago, that a Scottish minister,
named Lunn, predicted public events
which took place in 1827, 1830, 1843, and
1848: but, irrespective of the vagueness of
his language, the old pastor made quite a
hobby of foretelling; and he was pretty
sure of hitting the mark now and then.

That predictions, acting on the imagination,
tend sometimes to bring about their
fulfilment, is evident in various ways, and
has in more countries than one engaged
the attention of the ruling powers. At one
time the Roman law forbade the
practising of foretelling, if likely to influence
the conduct of the person for or against
whom the forecast was directed. "When
a person receives a prophecy, promising
him some great elevation of dignity, his
disposition is not to sit quiet, awaiting the
spontaneous fulfilment of his destiny, but
to resort to active means for bringing about
the event." Our Tudor sovereigns did not
lose sight of this matter. Statutes were
passed by Henry the Eighth and by Elizabeth,
imposing penalties or punishments
for the utterance of predictions of evil
in political or national affairs. Coke
remarked on this subject: "He that hath
read our histories shall find what lamentable
and fatal events have fallen out upon
some prophecies carried out by the invention
of wicked men, pretended to be accurate,
but merely framed to deceive; and
withal, how credulous and inclinable our
countrymen in previous times to these have
been." Shakespeare had his thoughts in
this direction when he drew the character
of Macbeth; the prophecy having been
uttered that he should be king, he could
not wait for its spontaneous fulfilment, but
killed Duncan in order to expedite and
render certain the result. The prediction
of death is known to be often disastrous in
its effect upon the imagination of the person
to whom it applies. And a dream
sometimes acts in a similar way. On one
occasion, in the last century, a man dreamed
that he would die on a certain day; he
mentioned the dream to others, but without
attaching importance to it. The day
passed, and he commented laughingly on
the failure of the prediction. "Oh," said
a mischief-maker near him, "this is new
style; dreams and ghosts reckon by old
style; there are eleven days more yet."
During those eleven days the imagination
of the man brooded over the matter, and
he died. Holinshed speaks of an early
Scottish king, who sent one of his courtiers
to consult a witch, or wise woman, about
the result of a war in which he was
engaged. The witch declared that the king
would shortly be murdered, and by one of
his own adherents. The prediction
(according to the chronicler) brought about
its own fulfilment. The courtier argued
with himself, "If I tell this to the king, he
will think that I am the predestined agent,
and will kill me to prevent me from killing
him. If I do not tell him, but he learns it
from some one else, he will still more surely
suspect me." Therefore, the courtier, to
make sure so far, killed the king. The
famous story of Lord Lyttelton is too well
known to call for more than a mere
reference here.

Many predictions can only be regarded
as fulfilled by a little twisting of names
and words. The Empress Josephine, it is
said, believed a prediction to the effect that
she would fall from her high estate, and
die in a hospital; she died at Malmaison, a
name merely indirectly denoting a hospital.
The Duke of Suffolk, in 1450, was warned to
beware of the Tower, which would be fatal
to him; he died on shipboard, but the
interpreters dwelt on the fact that the ship
was named St. Nicholas of the Tower.
Nero was warned to beware of the seventy-