Few great moral or political revolutions have occurred which have not had their accompanying _prognostic_; and men of a philosophic cast of mind, in the midst of their retirement, freed from the delusions of parties and of sects, while they are withdrawn from their conflicting interests, have rarely been confounded by the astonishment which overwhelms those who, absorbed in active life, are the mere creatures of sensation, agitated by the shadows of truth, the unsubstantial appearances of things. Intellectual nations are advancing in an eternal circle of events and passions which succeed each other, and the last is necessarily connected with its antecedent: the solitary force of some fortuitous incident only can interrupt this concatinated progress of human affairs. That every great event has been accompanied by a presage or prognostic, has been observed by Lord Bacon. “The shepherds of the people should understand the prognostics of _state tempests_; hollow blasts of wind, seemingly at a distance, and secret swellings of the sea, often precede a storm.” Such were the prognostics discerned by the politic Bishop Williams, in Charles the First’s time, who clearly foresaw and predicted the final success of the puritanic party in our country: attentive to his own security, he abandoned the government and sided with the rising opposition, at a moment when such a change in the public administration was by no means apparent. (See Rushworth, vol. i. p. 420.) Dugdale, our contemplative antiquary, in the spirit of foresight, must have anticipated the scene which was approaching in 1641, in the destruction of our ancient monuments in cathedral churches. He hurried on his itinerant labours of taking draughts and transcribing inscriptions, as he says, “to preserve them for future and better times.” It is to the prescient spirit of Dugdale that posterity is indebted for the ancient monuments of England, which bear the marks of the haste, as well as the zeal, which have perpetuated them. Sir Thomas More was no less prescient in his views; for when his son Roper was observing to him that the Catholic religion, under the “Defender of the Faith,” was in a most flourishing state, the answer of More was an evidence of political foresight:—“True it is, son Roper! and yet I pray God that we may not live to see the day that we would gladly be at league and competition with heretics, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have ours quietly to ourselves.” The minds of men of great political sagacity were at that moment, unquestionably, full of obscure indications of the approaching change. Erasmus, when before the tomb of Becket, at Canterbury, observing it loaded with a vast profusion of jewels, wished that those had been distributed among the poor, and that the shrine had only been adorned with boughs and flowers:—“For,” said he, “those who