impostors--Nostradamus was an astrologer. Prophets and divines, owing to the spread of sound knowledge in modern times, are no longer to be reckoned as inspired, but as impostors; Nostradamus was a prophet and therefore an impostor. He arrived in the world a thousand years behind his time, and must lie down now under Scientific and Encyclopædic ridicule. At the close of the nineteenth century is it likely we can allow such claims to be made upon our credulity as the more rational part of the community refused to admit three hundred years ago?” To all this and to all such processes of reasoning, I need merely say that there is a credulity of superstition that has been always esteemed as degrading to human nature; but there is also a superstition of incredulity that is quite as debasing to human nature and even more so, for it springs from the folly of pride and conceit, and not, as the other does, from a misplacement of faith. By his second wife he left three sons and three daughters. The eldest was Cæsar, to whom he dedicated his first volume of the “Centuries.” Of these he wrote twelve in quatrains, and three of them are left imperfect, the seventh, the eleventh, and twelfth. But he also left some Forecasts written in prose, which Chavigny collected and arranged in twelve books. They are said to comprehend the history of France for about a century after his death--its wars, troubles, and whispered intrigues. The book is not mentioned by Brunet, 1839-45, and I do not find it in the British Museum; but the National Library is rather imperfectly supplied with the literature relating to this remarkable man; no doubt the authorities there look down upon him from the Olympus of Bloomsbury with a scientific disregard, as being a sort of gipsy fortune-teller of the sixteenth century, not worth completing. Do we expect a Messiah from that quarter? Can there any good thing come out of Aix in Provence? “Loco exiguo, obscuro, ignobili, barbaro, impio atque prophano?” This prose history of a hundred years would be interesting, if only to compare with the rhymed “Centuries,” which have a much vaster range, and are supposed by many to cover all the time from Louis XIV. to the establishment of Antichrist. Jean de Nostradamus, the brother of Michael, was Procureur to the Parliament of Aix, and wrote a work entitled “Les vies des plus célèbres et anciens poëtes provensaux, qui ont floury du tems des contes de Provence,” Lyon, 1575, a book still sought for, and rather rare. It has been seen above that Cæsar also wrote on the same subject. His work was entitled “Chronique de l’Histoire de Provence:” in this he introduced the lives of the poets, and the book was published in 1614 by his nephew, Cæsar de Nostradamus.