A tranquillised mind is requisite to prophecy. We find Elisha (2 Kings iii. 15) requiring a minstrel to play, that the hand of the Lord may come upon him. External objects disturb the senses, so that night is best for contemplation, as Malebranche is said to have shut himself up in a dark room to study and think out his “Recherche de la Vérité.” Solitude is essential to prophecy. A man cannot commune with heaven in the busy haunts of men. Nature is the presence-chamber of the Deity. Every man of sensibility knows this; and the prophet most of all men feels the pith and central depth of Pope’s fine line, and that he must reach prophecy “Looking through Nature up to Nature’s God.” Society demands that you sacrifice your convictions constantly to good manners. Social convention contaminates noble originality and high principle. Truth never dwells in the court of kings, and the drawing-rooms of the well-to-do are no fitter for its shrine, for the men and women there are royalties divested of respect and state-trappings; they are over-pampered humanities for the most part: to be much in their company you must compromise the divinest part of you--your convictions--and it is by pursuing conviction that the soul flies heavenward. One might write an essay on the Brazen Stool with its proverb _ex tripode loqui_, but anyhow these opening verses convey to the mind with wonderful brevity a vivid picture of a mediæval magician at his work. Garencières allegorises here so widely as to show what havoc ingenuity can play with _analogy_, which is a key to the occult things of the universe in good hands--those of the prophet, poet, or genius of any sort. The rod, he says, is the _pen_, placed in the middle of the branches means the _fingers_ of the hand, the water he dips it in is the _ink_ he writes with, wetting limb and foot is the _paper_ covered from top to bottom. Was manuscript ever, since the world began, more mystically shadowed forth? The interest of English readers will perhaps be most readily drawn to Nostradamus, by dealing first with some of the most remarkable prophecies concerning England; and with the invaluable aid of M. Anatole le Pelletier’s admirable work on Nostradamus, this can at any rate for a few of the quatrains be most readily accomplished. He gives six examples from the various “Centuries.” The first relates to the supremacy of England at sea: “L’Angleterre le Panpotent des mers.” The word Panpotent is a barbarous Græco-Latin word for πᾶν-potens, all-powerful. The periods M. le Pelletier would assign to these changes or revolutions in England extend from 1501, the birth of Lutheranism, to 1791, the commencement of the French Revolution. He selects Century iii., quatrain 57:-- “Sept fois changer verrez gent Britanique, Teints en sang en deux cens nonante an; Franche non point, par appuy Germanique; Aries doubte son pole Bastarnan.”