COMETS, AND THEIR TAILS OF
PROPHETS.

The office of Cassandra is not extinct,
though the Trojan prophetess herself has long
been in her grave. From time to time the
same disagreeable people appear in the midst
of society, enforcing attention by fearful tales
of ruin, which the event generally disproves.
But, whereas the ancient Cassandra was
always disbelieved, the modern Cassandras
are invariably credited. In times of real
calamity they are especially rife. Thus, when
the Plague was desolating London in the days
of Charles the Second, a half-naked fanatic
went about the town with a brazier of
burning coals upon his head, scattering fierce
denunciations on the terror-stricken citizens;
and, some century later, a crazed trooper, who
fancied himself an inspired religious apostle,
sent the more excitable part of Cockneydom
into fits of alarm at his glowing descriptions
of the coming earthquake, which, when it
did come, proved to be so gentle that, as
Horace Walpole said, you might have stroked
it. Most of us are old enough to remember
the agitation attendant on the comet of
eighteen hundred and thirty-two, which was
to roll us all into oblivion, and which made
many a nervous person shake into his mental
shoes, in spite of the re-assuring voices of
science and philosophy. Some ten years
later, a learned gentleman discovered that
Dr. John Dee had prophecied a dolorous
conclusion to famous London town at that
very date. The earth was to open without
any visible cause and to swallow the great
city like a gigantic pill, without giving any
chance to a modern Curtius to redeem his
country's capital by leaping into the gulf;
and such was the hold which this preposterous
fancy took upon the minds of the lower orders
of Irish they were seen, on the day when
the catastrophe did not take place, kneeling
in the streets of St. Giles's, and calling on all
the saints to save them, while rumours floated
up and down to the effect that Ludgate Hill
was beginning to sink, and the dome of
St. Paul's was settling heavily earthward.

Between that time and this, we could
probably count up half a score of anticipated
last days, advertised (by popular preachers,
in the secrets of the universe) as being
infallibly about to come-off at a given date,
but which, like the last nights of favourite
singers and actors, are capable of an indefinite
postponement.

The last absurdity of the kind—not,
however, chargeable to the pulpit, as far as we
know—is the promised destruction of the
world, on the thirteenth of next June, by the
comet, which is then to swoop down upon us.
These comets are the terrors of our system,
and have been charged with more mischief-
making, murders and crimes in general,
confusion of states, foreign and civil wars,
oppression. impiety, plague, pestilence, and
famine, that the Prince of darkness himself.
The ancients and moderns agree in attributing
to these swarthy visitors from remote space
a malign influence over human destinies.
Homer calls them,

     A fatal sign to armies on the plain,
     Or trembling sailors on the watery main

Milton compares Satan to a comet:

     That fires the length of Ophiucus huge
     In the Arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
     Shakes pestilence and war.

And Timon of Athens, in Shakespeare's
wonderful drama, bids Alcibiades and his
army:

     Be as a planetary plague, when Jove
     Shall o'er some high-viced city hang his poison
     In the sick air.

It is difficult to read the history of any
country without finding the great events
ushered in by skiey portents, wherefrom the
Cassandras of the time deduce appalling
vaticinations.  Not to go back to the fall of
Julius Cæsar—when

                                        The sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;

when (as Plutarch sets forth, and Shakespeare
sublimates into poetry) the hand of a slave
in the market-place burnt "like twenty
torches joined," without receiving any hurt;
when a prodigious lion glared in the Capitol,
and

     Men, all in fire, walk'd up and down the streets,

and "a hundred ghastly women, transformèd
with their fear," huddled together in one
heap—not to go back so far as that pre-
Christian era, we may discover, in very
modern times, not a few instances of the