The great English poets, on their part, have lifted up their voices to sing of the dire effects of Comets. Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, abounds in allusions to these dread wandering stars. Thus he makes Horatio in the first scene of “Hamlet” speak with awe of: “Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood; * * * * * And even the like precurse of fierce events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on.” More briefly Shakespeare in his “Henry VI.” refers to: “A Comet of revenge A prophet to the fall of all our foes”; and again, in “The Taming of the Shrew” to: “Some Comet or unusual prodigy.” Spenser in his “Faerie Queene” sings of a woman’s hair loosely dispersed in the wind: “All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast His heavy beames, and flaming lockes dispredd, At sight whereof the people stand aghast; But the sage Wizzard telles, as he has redd, That it importunes death and doleful drearyhedd.” John Milton, besides likening Satan to a Comet, as before quoted, also showed that he shared in the belief that the flaming swords mentioned in Holy Writ were Comets: “High in front advanced The brandish’d sword of God before them blazed Fierce as a Comet.” The poet Young, in his “Night Thoughts,” aptly writes of the Comet: “Hast thou ne’er seen the Comet’s flaming light? Th’ illustrious stranger passing, terror sheds On gazing Nations, from his fiery train.” The poets of other nations have written of Comets in like vein. There is an old German rhyme, sung by German school children even to-day, which has been put into English by Dr. Andrew D. White in his “History of the Doctrine of Comets”: “Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid range; Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquake, Floods and Direful Change.” This little rhyme was originally put forth for German school children by two Protestant preachers of Basle, Switzerland, at the time of the great Comet of 1618, which heralded the outbreak of the great “Thirty Years’ War.” These Protestant ministers got their belief in Comets and their evil influence upon mankind not from the Church of Rome, but from the Bible teachings of such great Protestant reformers as Martin Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox of Scotland, Bishop Jeremy Taylor and John Howe, the great Nonconformist divine. Martin Luther preached in one of his Advent sermons: “The heathen write that the Comet may arise from natural causes; but God creates not one that does not foretoken a sure calamity.” Luther’s friend, Melanchthon, in a letter, declared Comets to be “heralds of Heaven’s wrath.” Zwingli, in 1531, declared that the great Comet of that year (Halley’s Comet) was sent by God to betoken calamity.