It will perhaps be well before proceeding to the Quatrains to meet an objection against Nostradamus put forward by the famous Gassendi,[16] who received it from Jean-Baptiste Suffren. Gassendi, it seems, was at Salon in 1638, when Jean-Baptiste Suffren, a judge in that town, communicated to him the horoscope drawn by Nostradamus for his father Antoine Suffren, and written in our prophet’s _own hand_, giving ten points, such as he should have a long curly beard, so bent in age, that in his 37th year he should be wounded by his half-brothers, and he had none, and much more of the same sort, but invariably wrong, till the horoscope fixes Suffren’s death in 1618, whereas he died in 1597. Now, in the first place, Gassendi was of a sceptical turn of mind, so that he would be glad to find Nostradamus wrong. Then Nostradamus died in 1566, and only in 1638, seventy-two years after, do they produce this document and assert that it is in Nostradamus’s handwriting. We may assume that the MS. was eighty years old at least. Gassendi does not profess to know his handwriting, but took it to be so on Jean-Baptiste Suffren’s simple assertion. It is perfectly possible that Suffren had some desire to ridicule an astrologer, and might have invented the whole thing. At any rate, it is not likely that _every one_ of ten or eleven guesses would be precisely the contrary of the fact.[17] One of the clauses ran that at twenty-five he should cultivate rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, theology, natural science, and the occult philosophy. Jean-Baptiste has the effrontery to say that he studied not one of these, but only the science of jurisprudence. It is not likely, I say, that Nostradamus would guess wrongly in all the sciences, and leave out the only one that the man pursued. This looks as if it had been manufactured for the express purpose of bringing the name of Nostradamus into ridicule and disrepute. It is quite certain that the late John Varley, the painter, could draw some most wonderful horoscopes; a cousin of my father’s, in whose family he taught, had seen his forecasts marvellously verified. So correct had he frequently been that at the time she knew him it was with the greatest difficulty he could be induced to draw one. It is not likely that Nostradamus would fall so absurdly short of John Varley. Guessing at haphazard would correspond with the facts better than this upon the mere doctrine of probabilities. Jean-Baptiste in his haste has proved too much, and Gassendi, like a multitude of incredulous people, was quite ready to receive too much of the things for which his mouth was open and eager. (_To be continued._) A Dead Flemish City. _NOTES OF A VISIT TO DAMME._ BY THE REV. JOSEPH MASKELL.