If a prediction be raised on facts which our own prejudices induce us to infer will exist, it must be chimerical. We have an Universal Chronicle of the Monk Carion, printed in 1532, in which he announces that the world was about ending,[192] as well as his chronicle of it; that the Turkish empire would not last many years; that after the death of Charles the Fifth the empire of Germany would be torn to pieces by the Germans themselves. This monk will no longer pass for a prophet; he belongs to that class of historians who write to humour their own prejudices, like a certain lady-prophetess, who, in 1811, predicted that grass was to grow in Cheapside about this time![193] The monk Carion, like others of greater name, had miscalculated the weeks of Daniel, and wished more ill to the Mahometans than suit the Christian cabinets of Europe to inflict on them; and, lastly, the monastic historian had no notion that it would please Providence to prosper the heresy of Luther! Sir James Mackintosh once observed, "I am sensible that in the field of _political prediction_ veteran sagacity has often been deceived." Sir James alluded to the memorable example of Harrington, who published a demonstration of the impossibility of re-establishing monarchy in England six months before the restoration of Charles the Second! But the author of the Oceana was a political fanatic, who ventured to predict an event, not by other similar events, but by a theoretical principle which he had formed, that "the balance of power depends on that of property." Harrington, in his contracted view of human nature, had dropped out of his calculation all the stirring passions of ambition and party, and the vacillations of the multitude. A similar error of a great genius occurs in De Foe. "Child," says Mr. George Chalmers, "foreseeing from experience that men's _conduct_ must finally be decided by their _principles_, FORETOLD _the colonial revolt_. De Foe, allowing his prejudices to obscure his sagacity, reprobated that suggestion, because he deemed _interest_ a more strenuous prompter than _enthusiasm_." The predictions of Harrington and De Foe are precisely such as we might expect from a petty calculator, a political economist, who can see nothing farther than immediate results; but the true philosophical predictor was Child, who had read the _past_. It is probable that the American emancipation from the mother country of England was foreseen twenty or thirty years before it occurred, though not perhaps by the administration. Lord Orford, writing in 1754, under the ministry of the Duke of Newcastle, blames "The instructions to the governor of New York, which seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico, and for a Spanish tribunal, than for a free British settlement, and in such opulence and such haughtiness, that _suspicions had long been conceived of their meditating to throw off the dependence on their mother-country_." If this was written at the time, as the author