He seems to have enjoyed and to have deserved a high reputation as a physician; and when the plague ravaged the south of France his success in treating it was so great that the magistrates of Aix engaged him at the public expense to minister to the relief of the perishing population of that city. Three years he was so employed with general satisfaction, and then returned to his quiet abode at Salon.

Were it worth inquiry, it might be discovered whether it was before or after this time that Nostradamus became known as a prophet. His first renown was something of the kind rendered familiar to us all of late by the daily bulletins of "Old Probabilities." He was a weather-witch, and seems to have been regarded as a rain-doctor by "the wondering bumpkins round." But he by no means confined his speculations to the portents of approaching wet or dry weather. was not content to say, when he saw lightning flashing from dark incumbent clouds, that there might be a thunder-storm; or when he heard the sough of the mistral in the south, that you might expect a high wind. He became a regular manufacturer of almanacs, after the fashion of the "Dutch Almanacs," containing prognostications of the weather throughout the changing seasons of the year. There is much to be said on this subject, but it must be passed over or postponed till there is an opportunity of discussing the curious history of such almanacs and of weather predictions. Nostradamus pushed his prophetic ventures much further, and dealt in political and other vaticinations, which, like the beard of Sir Hudibras,

did denounce

The fall of empires and of crowns.

"I was willing," says he, "for the common good to enlarge myself in dark and abstruse sentences, declaring the future events, chiefly the most urgent; and those which I foresaw (whatever humane mutation might happen) would not offend the hearers, all under dark figures more than prophetical." Doubtless his pretensions to weather-wisdom, his announcement of rain and wind and hail and snow, his directions for purges and bleedings and seasonable prophylactics according to the therapeutics of the time, his recommendations for paring nails and cutting hair and shearing sheep, and for other domestic and agrestic operations, gave him the widest as well as the earliest fame.

He with the moon was more familiar
Than e'er was almanach well-willer;
Her secrets understood so clear
That some believ'd he had been there;
Knew when she was in fittest mood
For cutting corns or letting blood:
When for anointing scabs or itches,
Or to the head applying leeches;
Whether the wane be or increase
Best to set garlic or sow pease;

Who first found out the man i' the moon
That to the ancients was unknown.

His wondrous foreknowledge thus came into great repute among an ever-widening circle of vulgar admirers. He was much consulted and highly regarded. His popularity encouraged him to bolder flights,

and if not to dare "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," at least to attempt more than others had dared.

His audacity grew with his popularity, and his popularity extended with his audacity. He became a regular almanac-monger, and filled his annual issues with astrological schemes, cabalistic figures and oracular intelligence. The gaping public bought, wondered, studied, were perplexed, waited in anxious expectation for some lucky accomplishment, failed to understand, but still admired and believed. The kingdom was sowed broadcast with prophecy waiting for its ears to ripen. Booksellers caught the Sibylline infection, employed hacks for diviners, worshipped a great prophet, and multiplied almanacs and predictions in the name of Nostradamus. The fever was so general that a fellow-collegian and brother mediciner of the seer endeavored to administer a palliative by means of a homeopathic remedy. Similia similibus curantur-like cures like. It was unquestionably in ridicule of these shoals of prophetic almanacs that Francis Rabelais, under the anagram of Alcofribas Nasier, composed his "Pantagruelinic Prognostication, certain, veritable and infallible for the perpetual year," declaring, "I have resolved all the pantarchs or governing powers of the heavens; I have calculated the quadratures of the moon; I have digested into crochets all that was never dreamt by all the astrophilists, hypernephelists, wind-keepers, sky-searchers, shadow-casters; I have compared everything with Empedocles, and now commend it to your good favor. I assure you that I say nothing that I do not think, and think nothing but what actually is; and, in truth, it is nothing else but what you will read forthwith. Whatever may be said in addition shall be passed over, right or wrong. Peradventure, it will happen; peradventure, it will not happen." Notwithstanding sundry chronological difficulties, the ridicule of Nostrodamus is unmistakable in the reference to the "fool astrologers of Louvain, Nuremberg, Tubingen and Lyons."

It is a strange figure that Michael Nostradamus presents to our contemplation in the middle of the sixteenth century. It is a strange distempered century in the midst of which he is placed, and to which he becomes quaintly assimilated. He had been born amid wars and surprises and rapid somersaults of fortune; he had grown up amid the great wars and rumors of war which filled the reigns of Charles V. and Francis I.; he had been contemporary with furious and repeated campaigns, victories and defeats, the captivity of king, pope and princes, the dethronement of rulers, the creation of new sovereigns and dynasties, the introduction of the Turks and Barbary pirates into Christian warfare and Christian diplomacy, the reformation in religion, the unsettlement of all opinion, and the apparent revelry of hazard and misrule. When he settled at Salon in the last years of Francis I., the fourth war between France and Spain was just closing, but new wars were in prospect, and other wars might be foreseen issuing from them. Everything was disturbed and in confusion; no earthly regulation of affairs was discernible. Might not "the stars in their courses fight against Sisera, and prognosticate by their aspects, their ascensions, their occultations, oppositions and conjunctions, the scheme of providence which was mirrored so indis

tinctly and unapprehensibly in the troubled waters of the sublunary creation"? Nostradamus was no contemptible scholar, as his familiarity with the elder Scaliger demonstrates. He was a physician of recognised and approved skill; he was reputable in all his domestic and social relations. But the times were out of joint. He was a mathematician by descent, and the hereditary craze of astrology and divination was in his blood. It is hard to determine where whim and fantasy pass into self-delusion; by what means and stages self-delusion is merged into credulity, credulity into superstition, superstition into hypocrisy, and hypocrisy into presumptions and arrogant charlatanry. Through all these phases Nostradamus seems to have passed. When the amiable weakness of family hallucinations crossed the line of conscious fallibility and was transmuted into astrological mummery, we cannot tell. We cannot be far wrong in concluding that the prophetic almanacs, which had been in fashion before his manhood, were the mode and the instruments of the change. Nevertheless, the pretence of prevision was never entirely without the sincerity of delusion. "By the likeness of our good genius to the angels," says he in his preface to his son Cæsar, the namesake of Cæsar Scaliger, "this heat and prophetical power draws near us, as it happens by the beams of the sun, which cast their influence both on elementary and not elementary bodies. Besides, there are or may come some persons, to whom God Almighty will reveal by impressions made on his understanding some secrets of the future according to the Judicial Astrology; as it hath happened in former times, that a certain power and voluntary faculty possessed them as a flame of fire, so that by his inspiration they were able to judge of divine and humane things." The prose of the prophet is as obscure and unintelligible as his verses will be found to be; nevertheless he seems to be in earnest. He professes to have rejected all forbidden arts, and to have burnt the mystical books in which they had been contained, and which had been presented to him. He clearly enough declares that he "had put in writing his prophecies," by the means of Judicial Astrology and "Divine inspiration, with continual supportations." His procedure was "by Divine inspiration, supernatural, according to the cœlestial figures; the places, and a part of the time, by an occult property, and by a divine virtue, power and faculty, in the presence of which the three times are comprehended by eternity, revolution being tyed to the cause that is past, present and future.' It will thus be seen that this deliberate vaticinator claimed the prophetic endowment by both of the modes distinguished by Cicero-celestial influxes and traditional art and that in making the claim he had a sort of unsteady conviction that he was making no false pretensions.

Paulo majora canamus. We proceed to higher manifestations, being limited by our space to brief and hurried reflections on the remarkable career which unfolds itself before us. Whether it was in consequence of the intrusion of the book-selling fraternity into his vocation, or in consequence of growing and more confident ambition, that Nostradamus altered his course, can scarcely be determined now. He did change his tactics. He entered upon a higher sphere of oracular ministrations; he addressed himself to a more sober and intelligent

audience, if such an audience should be pleased to listen; and he did what Job wished that his adversary had done - he wrote a book. It is unimportant to inquire whether he seated himself in his arm-chair or Delphic tripod, invoked his inspiring genius-"Aura, lenis aura veni" and day after day deliberately concocted his prescient wares for the contemplated market; or whether he gathered up all the loose and unconsumed litter which he had been for years accumulating to meet occasional demands, and to satisfy the annual necessities of his almanac litter-ature; but by one or other of these procedures, or by both, he scraped together seven hundred oracles, framed into quatrains of the most unmeaning wordage and the ruggedest kind of verse, and published at Lyons in 1555 the "Seven Centuries of Michael Nostradamus."

The darkness of all prophecy is proverbial; the ambiguities and equivocations and perplexities and unintelligibilities of pagan and profane oracles in all lands and tongues are well known ; but Nostradamus surpasses all former experience, and transcends all future possibilities in every respect. There are many kinds of obscurity and many causes of rhetorical bewilderment. They are more numerous and more innumerable than the multitudinous species of folly; and Rabelais has distinguished two hundred and nine well-marked classes of fools, without exhausting the catalogue, without depriving "The Shippe of Fooles" of the promise of fresh voyages, and without including the multiplication of breeds due to the ingenuity of recent times. But of all sources of obscurity the most certain and the most successful is entire vacuity of thought, perfect, conscious, deliberate absence of meaning. These merits the Centuries of Nostradamus usually possess, with whatever other defects they may be accompanied. They never straggle into sense, or go astray into significance. They are thus ready at a moment's notice, convenient for all uses, bike empty and elastic moulds, which will receive any plastic substance that may be put into them, and return any shape which the pressure put upon them may create. The interpreter of futurity shuffled words, names, proper and improper, and phrases together, as if he had been shuffling his cards, and dealt them out in equal parts like he had been distributing them in a four-handed game. He was solicitous only for their terminations; careless of his rhymes, but careful to have rhymes.

He was too warm on picking work to dwell,
But fagotted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhym'd and rattled, all was well.

This was the mystery of his craft, this the secret of his inspiration. Fortune was his art; and his art was his fortune —Ars illi fortuna erat. No wisdom, no science, no second-sight could have been more successful. His predictions were unintelligible, therefore they were full of latent meanings, and accordingly they were accepted with credulous amazement. If everything unknown is held to be marvellous, everything unfathomable should be profound. It is a just proportion. Omne caliginosum pro profundo is a fair counterpart and antithesis for Omne ignotum pro mirabili. The event, as will hereafter be seen,

appeared to justify the popular admiration and the public belief, and to confirm the renown of the prophet for many generations after his death.

His contemporary fame, however, was great; it spread, like widening rings upon the bosom of a lake, till it reached from his obscure Salon to the royal court. Henry II. and his Queen, the notorious Catharine de' Medici, heard amid the clash of arms, the splendor of pageants and the revelry of regal and princely halls, that a prophet had arisen in their land. They invited the herald of the destinies to the royal abode. The yet unrevealed Jezebel and her spouse had no desire to put the messenger of futurity out of the way. They wanted to test and use his knowledge; not to abuse his person. Henry was bold, warlike, ostentatious, reckless, ambitious, with much roystering geniality of temper, and much controlled by the veteran arts and antiquated charms of the well-kept Diane de Poictiers. Catharine, who was not yet forty, and who was twenty years younger than her rival for the royal favors, was in the maturity of her matronly beauty, with all her fascinations, accomplishments, arts, and wondrous intellect and tact, fully trained, tutored, disciplined, but exercised in vain upon. her neglectful husband, who could not or would not renounce Diana's ancient reign. She had brought with her to France, from her native Italy and from her Florentine home, a firm belief in starry influences and intelligences—a trust in diviners and their divinations, and Italian unscupulousness in the practice and use of all suspicious means to attain a contemplated end. At this time, however, the dark capabilities of her nature had not hardened into habits, the hazardous necessities of her position had not beguiled her into seeking security from a network of crimes. She was only the humble, submissive, unregarded wife; wounded in heart, anxious for the future, apprehensive for her children. She might be only a beautiful tigress, watching an opportunity to spring upon its prey; but at any rate the tigress was now asleep, or feigning sleep.

Both the King and the Queen were superstitious; and both had ample reasons for prying into the future. It is only after a long series of crushing calamities and the death of hope that we resign ourselves to the wisdom of Horace's warning: "Seek not to know, for it is impious, what issues the gods have ordained for you or for me." Such abstinence was certainly unfamiliar in the sixteenth century. Did not Catharine keep an astrologer in the tower of the palace; diviners, confectioners, pharmaceutists (venefici, pharmacopola), in retired chambers and dark closets? Henry had much to ask about the coming time. Would he regain the Duchy of Milan? How would his campaigns in Italy and Flanders eventuate? What victories and what laurels awaited his military genius? When and how would the bloody rivalry with Spain come to an end? Could the Constable de Montmorenci maintain his ascendancy, and retain the turbulent nobles in submission to his own negligent and spendthrift rule?

Catharine had deeper and darker solicitudes, and more anxious inquiries to make of the hastening years. Should she ever gain her due place in her husband's heart and by her husband's side? Should she die prematurely, what would be the fortune of her children?