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T. You have told me nothing of the meeting as a demonstration to other countries. How, think you, will it appear to them?

J. It left on my mind the deep conviction that you will hear nothing more of the invasion of England. In this respect it beat the review hollow. That was a grand thing, a noble thing; but it was soldiering, and there are others who can play at soldiers besides ourselves. The French can, the Austrians can, the Prussians can; but they can't shoot-I mean, it does not come so natural to them as it does to us. Why, I stood in a squad of sixteen men, to shoot for the Whitworth rifles; perhaps, with three or four exceptions, not one of those men had ever fired a rifle a short year ago; and yet, as I said before, not a sheep could have lived a minute before them at 500 yards. Why, any four of them would have silenced a gun in a couple or three discharges, by striking dead every man and horse attached to it. It is true, we had the Victorias and the Inns of Court men in the squad (and right well they shot), and generally, perhaps, the volunteers who assembled at Wimbledon, in some sense, may be looked upon as picked men; but you may be sure it was but a matter of small degree, and that in any company or corps you would find the next fifteen or twenty nearly, if not quite, as good as the men that were sent. Next year I believe 1000 yards will be as readily and truly gauged as the 500 were then. All our men want now is the opportunity of practice. The position drill is a truth, and a little actual shooting is all that is now needed to turn it to account. The north countrymen did better than the south from this very cause. With us southerners, and particularly with the Londoners, it was a very difficult thing to get at a range at all, and much interest had to be used to get even the selected men a shot before the day. When once we have got ranges-and it will not now be long first-the Saxon eye, and steadiness of hand and temper will be sure to tell, and you will find the mountaineers nei

ther from Scotland nor Switzerland will beat us.

T. Talking of Switzerland, how did the Switzers do?

J. They were first-rate. They were no doubt almost without exception admirable shots, and could well be entrusted with their liberties against a whole army of Zouaves and Turcos. They were intelligent, well-conditioned men, who quickly learnt to appreciate the English rifle; and I really believe the best thing that could have happened to them was the detention of their own weapons in the French Douanes, for it was the means of introducing them to a better weapon. In this way the accident may bear upon the fortunes of Europe, should the unequal game of war be tried.

T. Some objection has been made, I believe, to opening the competition to all comers, as teaching the foreigner to beat us with our own weapons.

J. I heard of it; but don't agree with the objectors. I believe open competition is the soul of all excellence; and, of all nations, the English are sure to profit by it. But, of all people, the Swiss should be admitted to share in the advantage as a matter of policy; because, in the game of European politics, their sympathies are sure to be with England, and thus, in giving them a better weapon, we are in fact assisting an ally.

T. Were there not some complaints of the cartridges at the meeting?

I. Yes, great complaints; but I was unable to judge of them, because, as I mentioned to you, I had not fired ball cartridge before.

T. No doubt the controversy will lead to the best thing being procured in the end; for there is nothing to prevent celerity of loading, which is the object of the easy fit, being combined with accuracy of shooting, as soon as the right measures both in powder and lead are hit. Did you witness the conclusion of the contest?

J. No, I did not. I was obliged to leave after the rifle given by the Swiss was shot for. But the practice seems to have been admirable. Twenty-four points obtained out of thirty shots-ten shots

at 800, 900, and 1,000 respectively-won the Queen's prize; and the victor was a young man, not of age-a strong argument in favour of the public school corps, which I should like to see instituted at once. It will be long a question between the young and the middle-aged men. If "years steal fire from the mind, and vigour from the limb," in rifleshooting at least they will impart steadiness and judgment. Still, the keenness of sight and the pliancy of body are with the youth, and they are wonderful aids in such a contest. It is, however, a great

thing for the middle-aged men of this generation to find a new pastime opened to them, and one in which they can largely utilize the love of sport and exercise that they cherished in their youth, at a time when cricket and boating must be perforce foregone. The rifle is in their hands; and they can use it up to a green old age, and improve year by year in the knowledge and practice of their piece; and, if the boys beat them, they will, as was the case here, have the satisfaction of being beaten by their

sons.

ON UNINSPIRED PROPHECY.

BY HERBERT COLERIDGE.

UNINSPIRED Prophecy! The phrase will probably sound like a contradiction in terms to many readers. From our early familiarity with the prophetical writings of the Bible, we are led so irresistibly to associate the power of foretelling future events with the presence of a divine and holy aflatus, that we can hardly bring ourselves to admit the authenticity of any alleged instances of the exercise of the same power, when they occur beyond the pale of the sacred books. Yet even the Bible itself, in such cases as that of Balaam, and of the Egyptian and other magicians (of whose business divination formed a considerable part), and in the various directions and warnings about false prophets contained in the law,1 evidently countenances a belief that a real power of seeing into futurity existed, not only in chosen individuals of a "peculiar people," but among the heathen also, and in men by no means remarkable for sanctity. And it will be hardly necessary to remind the reader, that in the early history of all nations, the existence of such a power under one form or another is tacitly assumed,2 while in those of more advanced civilization, such as the

1 Deut. xiii. 1-3. xvii. 20-22. 2 Cic. de Div. i. 1, 2.

Greeks and Romans, special institutions for the solemn communication of this important species of information were organized and maintained as an essential part of the state machinery. At a certain era, however, in the life of each people this general and unhesitating faith begins to waver; the scepticism, which originates in the more educated portion of the community, slowly filters downward through the several underlying strata, and after a while becomes widely diffused, although a dim notion not only of the possibility of such knowledge, but also of its continued existence in certain mysteriously favoured individuals at any given epoch, is never perhaps wholly eradicated.

We

It is not, however, our intention on the present occasion to enter into any discussion respecting the possible nature and source of this power, or to account by any theory of our own for the extraordinary influence it has at different times exercised over mankind. rather wish to bring together some of the more striking instances of its operation, which may serve to call attention to a subject of considerable interest in more points of view than one. To any really philosophical investigation of the subject, a much larger accumulation of instances than we at present possess

would be an indispensable requisite ; and those here given are merely intended as a first contribution towards such a collection. It will be as well,

however, to remind the reader, that the instances we are about to bring forward are those of prediction proper, that is to say, of a distinct foretelling of events which do not actually take place till long after the utterance of the prophecy. Mere chance coincidences, such as are occasionally evolved from the names of individuals by some anagrammatic process, or such as are found to exist now and then between the meaning of the name of an individual and his actual career in life, however striking they may seem, must here be passed

over.

1

2

3

The Greek oracles naturally come first for consideration, and among them those of Apollo clearly have a right to pre-eminence. For although Jupiter and other Gods did a little prophetic business for a select set of clients, the establishment at Delphi practically eclipsed all the others, and almost reduced them to a state of inactivity. Many were deterred from making use of the older shrines by some uncomfortable or nerve-shaking ceremonial, to which the inquirer was obliged to submit before a response could be elicited, or by the filthy habits of the priests (as at Dodona): Apollo managed- matters with more practical wisdom in these respects, besides throwing open gratis to the inspection of visitors that magnificent museum of ancient art, which attested the superstition and the gratitude of half the ancient world. Yet it is singular enough, that hardly one unimpeachable instance of a prediction, truly and fairly verified by the event, can be quoted out of the multitude preserved to us by ancient authors. For in the first place it must be remembered, that many of the responses of the oracle, we might say a majority, were mere moral apothegms, such as "know thyself,"

1 E. g. Horatio Nelson-Honor est a Nilo. William Noy-I moyl in law..

2 As Demosthenes, Aristides, &c. 3 Il. xvi. 235.

4

"nothing in excess," &c., or opinions given as to the course to be adopted in cases of conscience. Another large portion consisted of ambiguous answers, which could be construed so as to save the credit of the oracle, whichever way the event fell out; mere quibbles of language, in fact, such as that given to Croesus as to his crossing the Halys, and to Pyrrhus, relative to his chance of success in his campaign against Rome;5 while not a few, which seem more truly predictive in character, are cases of fulfilment according to the letter, by means of some identity of name between two persons or places, one of which was well known, the other not. Of this last sort, the well-known prediction as to the death of our Henry IV. at Jerusalem, introduced by Shakspeare in the second part of his Henry IV. is a conspicuous example in modern times, and bears an exact analogy to that which deluded the wretched Cambyses into his terrible Ethiopian expedition, by promising him that his death-bed should be in Ecbatana. A predecessor, too, of Pyrrhus on the Epirot throne, Alexander, was unlucky enough to be the victim of a precisely similar humbug on the part of the venerable oracle of Dodona was told to avoid the river Acheron, and as there was a river of some note bearing that name in his own kingdom of Epirus, he naturally supposed that he might safely accept an invitation to an Italian campaign on behalf of the Tarentines, who just then were suffering annoyance from their Lucanian and Bruttian neighbours. He ran upon his doom, however, as usual; he found a trumpery stream calling itself Acheron, in Bruttium, and there sure enough he was killed in the most appropriate manner, by some treacherous Lucanian exiles, while attempting to cross its swollen waters. These would answer our purpose well enough could we be certain, (which we cannot,) that they were not invented after the event, of

4 Herod. i. 91. 5 Act iv. Sc. 4. 8 Justin. xii. 3.

He

6 Cic. de Div. ii. 56.

7 Herod. iii. 61.

which, in most cases, the Delphic establishment would be the first to receive intelligence. Probably, as the oracle grew richer and richer, it kept in permanent pay a number of secret and very special correspondents, and thus secured the latest news at the earliest possible period.

Perhaps, however, the famous response given to the Athenian envoys before the battle of Thermopylæ, that the "wooden wall" had been granted by Jove to Athene as a last refuge for the inhabitants of the doomed city, and the distinct prediction that Salamis should be a scene of slaughter,1 some months before the Persian fleet was actually destroyed there, comes nearer to the fulfilment of our conditions than any other. In this case we have the advantage of contemporary testimony to the fact of the prediction and the time of its delivery in the person of Herodotus; and although we may not quite share his reverent faith in these prophetic utterances, and may suspect that Themistocles had as much to do with the inspiration of the Pythoness on this occasion as Apollo, still the guess was a bold one, and the accuracy of its fulfilment must have struck even those in the secret. Neither the place of the battle, nor the victorious issue, were in any sense certainties. So in the account of the plague which desolated Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides mentions an ancient prediction, one at least in existence before his own time, which foretold the approach of a Dorian war with a pestilence in its train ; and, notwithstanding his sneering criticism, it is evident that the correspondence of the event with the prophecy was sufficiently noteworthy to cause no small stir in people's minds at Athens. To another recommending that a certain plot of ground under the Acropolis had better be left untouched and unbuilt upon 3. an injunction which had to be disregarded when the whole population were

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driven to take refuge within the walls -he seems to attach somewhat more weight, and suggests an interpretation of the oracular fragment, plausible enough in itself, but which robs it to some extent of its prophetic character. His solution is, that it would be most assuredly better for Athens that the plot of land should remain open, because as long as it was possible to keep it so, so long would it be evident that the extreme limit of calamity and distress had not been reached. In other words, the building would not cause the calamity, but would never take place as a fact till the worst calamity was at hand.

We might go on to cite other similar instances; but, as was said before, although a complete collection of all the oracular responses recorded in the pages of Greek writers would amount to many hundreds, the number of fortunate fulfilments, in cases where collusion can be shown to have been impossible, is far less than the average of probabilities would lead one to expect. De Quincey, in his excellent essay on the Pagan Oracles, to a certain extent accounts for this by an ingenious theory that the two principal functions of the establishment at Delphi were that of an universal news-agency office, and that of a national bank, or safe depository of money and valuables, which the domestic architecture of the time exposed to the mercy of the first burglar who could use a chisel; but at the same time he certainly understates its activity and Vogue as a means of obtaining information as to coming events.

Let us cross the Adriatic and enter the territory of that sublime nation whose history was' for so many ages the history of the world, of which in the fulness of time they became the masters. How different is the impression we receive from a survey of their history from that derived from the pages of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. In Greece, the component elements of the nation seem to be perpetually exerting repulsive forces on each other: no combination is ever stable; while Rome, through all the long stages of its rise and decline, is ever one, and expands

only by absorptions into a central nucleus rapidly and irresistibly assimilated, rather than by mere appendages of territory which never lose their original character of excrescences, merely adhering to the main body, not partaking as true members of its life and It energy. is this uniting tendency ever rivetting the attention on the ancient centre and birthplace of the nation that invests their history with such unequalled grandeur; and we should à priori almost expect to find that such a part as it was theirs to play on the world's great stage would not be wholly devoid of elements of mystery, or unaccompanied, at least in tradition, with dark and portentous indications of a mighty destiny. Accordingly we do find at the very outset an augural prediction recorded respecting the duration of their empire, which it took twelve centuries to fulfil, but which those centuries did fulfil with an exactitude equal to that challenged by commentators for the numerical prophecies of the book of Daniel. The firm belief in the foundation of Rome about the middle of the eighth century before our era, and in the existence of a contemporaneous augury interpreted to predict a continuous existence of twelve centuries, is a fact which cannot be disputed, whether we look upon Romulus and his twelve vultures1 as mythical or not; and it is equally beyond controversy that the deposition of Augustulus, the last of the western emperors in the middle of the fifth century of our era, coincides almost to a year with the expiration of the appointed time. Here the nature of the case at once precludes all possibility of collusion; and, what is still more curious, we are not concerned to prove the actual occurrence of the omen as a fact; the universal and undoubting assumption of its reality by every generation of Romans renders the authenticity of the story immaterial. This is probably the most striking instance of the fulfilment of prophecy recorded in history, and it receives additional weight from the consideration that no hypothesis of a double fulfilment, one literal and immediate, the

1 Cic. de Divin. i. 48. Censorin. de d. N. c. 17.

other more distant and metaphorical or typical, can by any ingenuity find place here.

2

The discovery of America, which modern researches have shown to have been achieved by the Norsemen as early as the tenth century of our era, was anticipated by a Latin poet, who probably flourished in the first or second; although it must be confessed that the prophecy is a wide one, and fits its interpretation somewhat loosely. At the close of the second act of Seneca's Medea, the chorus end their song with the lines,

"Venient annis sæcula seris,

Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum "Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus, 'Tethysque novos detegat orbes, "Nec sit terris ultima Thule."

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Thus translated by John Studley in 1585

"Time shall in fine out breake "When ocean wave shall open every realme,

"The wandering world at will shall open lye,

"And Typhis will some newe founde land survey;

"Some travelers shall the countreys farre

escrye,

"Beyonde small Thule, knowen furthest at this day."

But an old poem in our own language, composed probably about the middle of the fourteenth century, will furnish us with a far more remarkable instance. In the tenth "Passus," or fytte of the Vision of Piers Plouhman, Clergy, one of the allegorical personages, after a long exposition of the sad state into which religion had then fallen, gives warning of the coming, though still distant, retribution, in lines which are worth quoting in their ancient garb :

"Ac ther shal come a kyng,
"And confesse yow religiouses,
"And bete you as the Bible telleth
"For brekynge of youre rule;

2 See the Antiqq. Americanæ, p. xxix. et sqq. Copenhagen. 1837.

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