popular tendency to see omens on the earth
and in the heavens whenever the nation is
disturbed to its centre by any great crisis.
Even as late as the days of William the
Third, we find Lord Lonsdale, at one time
Prime-Minister of that monarch, and one
of the three lords-justices who governed
the kingdom during the sovereign's absence
in Holland in seventeen hundred, in his
Memoir of the Reign of James the Second,
chronicling a prodigious comet which
appeared in sixteen hundred and eighty-one,
with a beard reaching to a third part of the
heavens, and which was supposed to be the
cause of the disasters that followed. His
lordship, indeed, thinks it is "not easy to
imagine how comets should occasion wars;"
but he records, with an evident lurking
belief in the connection between the one and
the other, that the appearance of this celestial
monster was followed by wars and persecutions
all over Europe, and by the invention
in England of hitherto unheard-of cruelties
for the punishment of the disaffected. He
also mentions certain fiery visions which
some persons saw in the clouds; but, these
he thinks of small account, as being in great
measure the creations of superstitious and
excited minds.

It is curious to observe how the people
conspire to place their rulers in the category
of superior beings, whose fall convulses the
universe.

If a king meet with a violent death, the
world shall be troubled for some months
beforehand, and the celestial regions shall
partake of the general disease. Stars shall rain
blood upon the earth; there shall be a
plurality of moons, or suns; an eclipse shall
darken the heavens with unnatural night;
armies shall rush to battle in the clouds,
with a noise of artillery; threatening arms
shall start out of the zenith, brandishing
portentous swords of fire; and there shall be
Lamentings heard i' the air,—strange screams of
   death,—
And prophecying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confused events,
New-hatch 'd to the woeful time.

The despot is beheaded, stabbed, poisoned,
or what not; and his successor is much
obliged to the Cassandras for their implied
recognition of the importance of the despotic
office, and puts an additional yoke round the
neck of the people, on the strength of their
credulity.

But, after all, the favourite subject of the
Cassandras is the extinction of the world.
This result is to be effected in various ways
—either by a sudden blow which will, at any
rate, very speedily put us out of our misery,
or by a lingering process of torture. Thus,
some one found out, a short time ago, that
the earth and the sun were getting farther and
farther apart every year, and that in process
of time the fructifying power, the physical
vitality of our planet, would necessarily
become less and less, until living beings, after
miserably dwindling and languishing for some
generations, would at length perish for want
of food, light, and warmth. Many of the
devotees in Cassandra's temple upheld this
opinion by referring to the potato disease, the
vine disease, and the diminished supply of
fruit, as evidences of a visible deterioration
in the earth's producing powers. But their
opinions have been contradicted by another
faction, the members of which contend that
the earth is getting nearer to the sun, and
that in time we shall be sucked into his fiery
vortex, and consumed like a moth in the flame
of a taper. Thus, if we are to escape gradual
starvation, it is only that we may be slowly
roasted alive. A third hypothesis is, that
the sun himself is absolutely going out, like
a lamp that has burnt its appointed time. A
gentleman signing himself Helioscopus,
recently wrote to the Times, to say that the
well-known spots on the sun's disc are increasing
in size and number. From this, we
suppose we are to infer that that robe of
fire and luminosity which encompasses the
opaque body of the sun, and which is the
source of all the vitality of our system, is
wearing out —dropping to pieces with celestial
rottenness. Several minor and purely
local signs of decay are also talked of. The
river Thames is said by some of the Cassandra
tribe to be decreasing in depth and volume,
and we are informed that the result must be
the presence of a dry ditch, instead of a noble
stream, between the Middlesex and Surrey
divisions of the great metropolis, followed by
the decay and desertion of London, and the
erection of Liverpool into the capital of the
empire. A report, however, just issued by
Captain Burstall, who has made an official
survey of the Thames from Blackwall to
Putney, shows that the river has actually
deepened by several feet since the removal of
the cumbrous old London Bridge, in eighteen
hundred and thirty-two, which increased the
scour, and that the same effect is still being
perpetuated by the action of the numerous
river steam-boats, and by dredging.

But, all such minor considerations give place
to the overmastering dread of the thirteenth of
next June—a fear not unfelt in this country,
but producing, in several parts of the continent,
a perfect madness of despair among
the peasantry, who refuse to till the ground,
to make provision for the harvest, or to
transact any business whatever. For, on the
terrible thirteenth, Time, like a grim bowler
at an awful game at cricket, is to deliver
a comet at this our earthly wicket, to terminate
our innings with a remorseless hand,
and stump us out for ever.

Against this unreasoning fear, there rises
up a French astronomer, who says that the
collision of a comet with this globe would be
(on the part of the comet), like the dashing
of a fly against a locomotive in full speed.
And Herr von Littrow, a German astronomer,