TH DERIDED FOREBODERS. GENESIS xix. 14. HE warning voice of Lot, assuring guilty Sodom of impending doom, was, even to those of his own house, by affinity, but as the event proved true sons of Sodom, and loyal to her to the last, a voice that croaked without occasion, a vox et præterea nihil. He seemed as one that mocked unto his sons-in-law. It is the way of the world. Now when much time was spent, and when sailing was now dangerous to the ship of Adramyttium, which sailed for Italy with St. Paul on board, and certain other prisoners, in charge of Julius, a centurion of Augustus' band, off the fair havens, the Apostle admonished those in authority, and said unto them, "Sirs, I perceive that this voyage will be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of our lives." Nevertheless, the centurion believed the master and the owner of the ship, more than those things which were spoken by Paul. It is the way of the world. The ante-Diluvian world had its Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and heeded him not while the ark was a-building. Troy had its Cassandra; and a proper croaker and a veritable bore Troy thought her. Only a bewildered, distraught ŒŒnone has a mind to Her, in the words of Tryphiodorus, Apollo made to be a true prophetess, and yet to find none to believe her prophecies: · Τὴν γὰρ Απόλλων ̓Αμφότερον μάντιν τ ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄπιστον ἔθηκε.” As Chamfort says, in his Maximes et Pensées, "Le rôle de l'homme prévoyant est assez triste; il afflige ses amis, en leur annonçant les malheurs auxquels les expose leur imprudence. DERIDED FOREBODERS. 19 On ne le croit pas; et, quand ces malheurs sont arrivés, ces mêmes amis lui savent mauvais gré du mal qu'il a prédit." Cassandra goes into exile after Troy is fallen, but her fate is a dismal one. A critic has said of the Agamemnon, of Eschylus, that the masterpiece of that great tragedy is the introduction of Cassandra, who accompanies the king of men, and who, in the very hour of his return, amidst the joy and pomp that welcome him, is seized with the prophetic inspiration, and shrieks out. those ominous warnings, fated ever to be heard in vain. Scarcely has the prophetess withdrawn, when we hear behind the scene the groans of the murdered king, and anon Clytemnestra is seen standing stern and lofty, by the dead body of her lord. The critics "have dwelt too much on the character of Clytemnestra—it is that of Cassandra which is the masterpiece of the tragedy." In a latter-day tragedy on the same subject, that Clytemnestra which was the first poem published by the son of the critic just quoted, the captive Cassandra figures imposingly and impressively : “Her heavy-fallen hair down her white neck In Shakspeare's Troilus and Cressida, she would have all Trojans cry, lend her ten thousand eyes, and she would fill them with prophetic tears :— Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled elders, But only Hector is wrought upon, or owns to be so, by these "high strains of divination" in his sister; and in an after scene he too is inexorable to her appeals, when Cassandra foresees his fall, and with it the fall of Troy; and when even Priam shares her foresight, and backs her entreaties, "like a prophet suddenly enrapt,” to tell him that the day is ominous. Says Troilus, “This foolish, dreaming, superstitious girl Makes all these bodements." A picture for all time is that painted by Josephus, of the son of Ananus, who, day and night in the narrow streets of the doomed city went along, repeating with a loud voice his burden of woe to Jerusalem and the Temple; who uttered no remonstrance when severely beaten, but still went on reiterating his fearful message of woe; who, when led before the Roman governor, Albinus, and scourged till his bones could be seen, uttered neither shriek of pain nor prayer for mercy, but raising his sad and broken voice as loud as he could, at every blow cried out-" Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" All the four years that intervened before the war, this rustic Jesus, son of Ananus, paid no attention to any one, nor even spoke, excepting the same words of "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" It was during the siege that he suddenly cried out, "Woe, woe to myself!" and was struck dead by a stone from a balista. Heartily laughed at, according to the Scottish legend, was Thomas the Rhymer, for the prediction he had uttered that the sixteenth day of March, in a memorable year for Scotland, should be the stormiest day that ever Scotland had witnessed. All the heartier was the laughing when the day continued as it began, remarkably clear, mild, and temperate. The laughing was at its height, when an express brought to the Earl of March the news of King Alexander's death, from the stumbling of his horse on the sea-coast of Fife (betwixt Burntisland and Kinghorn, the spot being still known as the King's Crag). "There," said the derided seer, "that is the storm which I meant; and there was never tempest to bring worse luck to Scotland." The foreboding was not falsified, but all too truly confirmed the repute of the Rhymer as True Thomas. Now, says Mr. Froude, describing the state of things in 1532, "the Nun of Kent grew louder in her Cassandra wailings.' She had an interview with the King on his return through DERIDED FOREBODERS. 21 Canterbury from the Continent, to try the effect of her Cassandra presence on his fears. Many are they that set up for Cassandras. Even a Mistress Afra Behn inclined to claim the dignity, when the frivolous court of Charles II. gave no credit to her discovery of the intention of the Dutch to sail up the Thames and Medway; a neglect to their fair envoy (at Antwerp) which made her renounce politics from that time forth. My Lord Chesterfield, writing, in 1759, on the gloomy prospect of affairs in Germany, remarks, not without cause to show for it, "I have, as you know, long foretold the now-approaching catastrophe ; but I was Cassandra." Chateaubriand complacently records his prediction that France wished to imitate England, and that Lewis the Sixteenth would perish on the scaffold. “Ferron was struck by my prediction: it was the first I had ever uttered. Since that time, I have made a great many others quite as true, and quite as little listened to." None found he to adopt towards him the style of Hamlet to his father's ghost:— "If thou art privy to thy country's fate, Which, happily, foreknowing, may avoid, Oh, speak!" The historian of the United Netherlands, describing how difficult Germany was to rouse in behalf of the Protestant league, speaks of the "jeremiads" of old John of Nassau as growing louder than ever at this crisis, but his voice was of one crying in the wilderness: the wrath to come of that horrible Thirty Years' War, which he was not to witness, seemed to inspire all his prophetic diatribes; but there were few to heed them. The history of the conquest of Granada commemorates the sensation produced in the Alhambra, at the time of the expedition of Muley Aben Hassan against the fortress of * Dryden's young favourite, Mistress Anne Killigrew, wrote a copy of verses, of which the concluding couplet is voted "excellent" by Leigh Hunt: "I willingly accept Cassandra's fate, To speak the truth altho' believed too late.” Zahara, by a voice that rose from the midst of the obsequious crowd, and burst like thunder upon the ears of the Moorish monarch, proclaiming,, " Woe! woe! woe! to Granada: its hour of desolation approaches! The ruins of Zahara will fall upon our heads: my spirit tells me that the end of our empire is at hand!" All shrank back aghast, and left the denouncer of woe standing alone in the centre of the hall. He is described as an ancient and hoary man, in the rude attire of a dervish: age had withered his form without quenching the fire of his spirit, which glared in baleful lustre from his eyes. By the Arabian historians he is called one of those holy men termed santons, who passed their lives in hermitages, in fasting, meditation, and prayer, until they attained to the purity of saints and the foresight of prophets; by Fray Antonio Agapida, “a son of Belial, one of those fanatic infidels possessed of the devil, who are sometimes permitted to predict the truth to their followers; but with the proviso that their predictions shall be of no avail." Like the stormy petrel of the song : "O'er the deep, o'er the deep, Where the whale, and the shark, and the sword-fish sleep, The Petrel telleth her tale-in vain ; For the mariner curseth the warning bird Who bringeth him news of the storms unheard. Ah! thus doth the prophet of good or ill Meet hate from the creatures he serveth still; Yet he never falters." To the same hand that penned these lines we owe the picture of The Prophet : "Time flew :-sad Wisdom from his heart arose, And touched his brain; And he stood up, 'midst all a Prophet's woes, And spoke,-in vain! He spoke :—men hearken'd to his piercing cry, But the dim Future felt his threatenings nigh, What the stormy petrel is in Barry Cornwall's song, the |