Cagliostro, professing to foresee the fate of La Perouse, is importunately asked by his fellow-guests at that memorable dinner-party commemorated by M. Dumas, why then he did not forewarn and save that brave man before setting out. At the very least, why not have told him to “beware of unknown isles”—that he might at any rate have had the chance of avoiding them? But, “I assure you no, count,” is the mystic’s reply; “and, if he had believed me, it would only have been the more horrible, for the unfortunate man would have seen himself approaching those isles destined to be fatal to him, without the power to escape from them. Therefore he would have died, not one, but a hundred deaths, for he would have gone through it all by anticipation. Hope, of which I should have deprived him, is what best sustains a man under all trials.” “Yes,” says Condorcet, the sceptical and sententious, “the veil which hides from us our future, is the only real good which God has vouchsafed to man.” And what again, to the same purport, says the Hermit Monk to Alpine’s Lord:— “Roderick, it is a fearful strife For man endowed with mortal life, Whose shroud of sentient clay can still Feel feverish pang and fainting chill, ... ’Tis hard for such to view, unfurl’d, The curtain of the future world. Yet witness every quaking limb, My sunken pulse, mine eyeballs dim, My soul with harrowing anguish torn,— This for my chieftain have I borne!” And therefore, says Sir Thomas Browne, in his moralisings on the undesirableness of all such foresight, “and therefore the wisdom of astrologers, who speak of future things, hath wisely softened the severity of their doctrines; and even in their sad predictions, while they tell us of inclination not coaction from the stars, they kill us not with Stygian oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of evasion.” _Tant mieux_ for those who, like Hudibras, ... “still gape to anticipate The cabinet-designs of fate, Apply to wizards to foresee What shall, and what shall never be;” like Hudibras, bursting with the wish, “Oh, that I could enucleate And solve the problem of my fate; Or find, by necromantic art, How far the destinies take my part!” Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions all. Sacred, therefore, be, in Thomson’s phrase, the veil that kindly clouds a light too keen for mortals, ... “for those that here in dust Must cheerful toil out their appointed years.”