The fatal necessity of event upon event, of omen, dream, and vision, is the great characteristic of the wondrous Greek drama. So awfully portrayed is the _OEdipus_--and with more grand and prophetic mystery pervading the _Agamemnon_. Had it not been congenial with popular belief, it could never have been so received; nor, indeed, could somewhat similar (though degraded from their high authority, as standing less alone by their amalgamation with a purer creed) characteristics in some of the plays of our own Shakspeare have touched the mind to wonderment, had there been no innate feeling to which they might, and without effort, unite. The progress, however, of the omen and vision, clearer and clearer, pointing to the very deed, and even while its enactment has commenced, and that fatality by which (prophetic, too) the plainest prophecy is unheeded, contemned, and the Prophetess herself doomed, and knowing herself doomed, may be considered as an epitome of the Grecian creeds upon the subject. It was no vulgar punning spirit that designated the very _name_ of Helen as a cursing omen. [Greek: "Tis pot' hônomazen hôd Es to pan etêtumôs-- Mê tis ontôn ouch orô-- Men pronoaisi tou peprômeuou Glôssan en tucha nemôn."] Helen, the destroyer--yes, that was her significant name. The present King of the French was not allowed to assume the title of Valois, which was, strictly speaking, his, and instead assumed that of Duc de Chartres, on account of an evil omen attached to the former name; and that evil omen originating in a curious fact, the seeing of a spectre by that German princess who succeeded the poisoned sister of our second Charles. But there is nothing in modern history more analogous to the fatalities of the Grecian drama than those singular passages relating to the death of Henry the Fourth of France. We have the gravest authority of the gravest historians, that prophecies, warnings, and omens so prepared Henry for his death, that he waited for it with a calm resignation, as to an irresistible fatality. "In fact," (says an eloquent writer in Maga of April 1840,) "it is to this attitude of listening expectation in the king, and breathless waiting for the blow, that Schiller alludes in that fine speech of Wallenstein to his sister, where he notices the funeral knells that sounded continually in Henry's ears; and, above all, his prophetic instinct, that caught the sound from a far distance of his murderer's motions, that could distinguish, amidst all the tumult of a mighty Capital, those stealthy steps."