must, therefore, be the great monarch and lord of all those .nations.

The same misfortune was also foretold when he demanded of Apollo if ever he should hear his dumb sou speak.

O foolish Croesus! who hast made this choice,

To know when thou shalt hear thy dumb son's voice
Better he still were mute, would nothing say ;-
When he first speaks, look for a dismal day!

This, if he contrived not the time and the means of his recovery, was no ordinary divination: yet how to make out the verity of the story, some doubts may yet remain. For, though the causes of deafness and dumbness were removed, yet since words are attained by hearing, and men speak not without instruction, how he should be able immediately to utter such apt and significant words, as "Ανθρωπε, μὴ κτεῖνε Kpoiσov, "O man! slay not Croesus," it cannot escape some doubt: since the story also delivers, that he was deaf and dumb, that he then first began to speak, and spake all his life after.

Now, if Croesus had consulted again for a clearer exposition of what was doubtfully delivered, whether the oracle would have spake out the second time, or afforded a clearer answer, some question might be made from the examples of his practice upon the like demands.

So, when the Spartans had often fought with ill success against the Tegeates, they consulted the oracle, what God they should appease, to become victorious over them. The answer was, "That they should remove the bones of Orestes." Though the words were plain, yet the thing was obscure, and like finding out the body of Moses. And, therefore, they once more demanded in what place they should find the ́same; unto whom he returned this answer,

When in the Tegean plains a place thou find'st
Where blasts are made by two impetuous winds,
Where that that strikes is struck, blows follow blows,
There doth the earth Orestes' bones enclose.

Which obscure reply the wisest of Sparta could not make

*Herod. 1. i. 85.

Now, if Crasus.] MS. Sloan. reads, "Now, notwithstanding this plausible apology and evasion, if Croesus."

out, and was casually unriddled by one talking with a smith, who had found large bones of a man buried about his house; the oracle implying no more than a smith's forge, expressed by a double bellows, the hammer and anvil therein.

Now, why the oracle should place such consideration upon the bones of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, a madman and a murderer, if not to promote the idolatry of the heathens, and maintain a superstitious veneration of things of no activity, it may leave no small obscurity.

Or why, in a business so clear in his knowledge, he should affect so obscure expressions it may also be wondered; if it were not to maintain the wary and evasive method in his answers: for, speaking obscurely in things beyond doubt within his knowledge, he might be more tolerably dark in matters beyond his prescience.

Though EI were inscribed over the gate of Delphos, yet was there no uniformity in his deliveries. Sometimes with that obscurity as argued a fearful prophecy; sometimes so plainly as might confirm a spirit of divinity; sometimes morally, deterring from vice and villany; another time viciously, and in the spirit of blood and cruelty; observably modest in his civil enigma and periphrasis of that part which old Numa would plainly name,* and Medea would not understand, when he advised Egeus not to draw out his foot before, until he arrived upon the Athenian ground; whereas another time he seemed too literal in that unseemly epithet unto Cyanus, king of Cyprus,† and put a beastly trouble upon all Egypt to find out the urine of a true virgin.

Sometimes, more beholding unto memory than invention, he delighted to express himself in the bare verses of Homer. But that he principally affected poetry, and that the priest not only nor always composed his prosal raptures into verse, seems plain from his necromantical prophecies, whilst the dead head in Phlegon delivers a long prediction in verse; and at the rising of the ghost of Commodus unto Caracalla, when none of his ancestors would speak, the divining spirit versified his infelicities; corresponding herein + V. Herod.

VOL. III.

*Plut. in Thes.

unto the apprehensions of elder times, who conceived not only a majesty but something of divinity in poetry, and, as in ancient times, the old theologians delivered their inventions.

Some critical readers might expect in his oraculous poems a more than ordinary strain and true spirit of Apollo; not contented to find that spirits make verses like men, beating upon the filling epithet, and taking the licence of dialects and lower helps, common to human poetry; wherein, since Scaliger, who hath spared none of the Greeks, hath thought it wisdom to be silent, we shall make no excursion.

Others may wonder how the curiosity of elder times, having this opportunity of his answers, omitted natural questions; or how the old magicians discovered no more philosophy; and if they had the assistance of spirits, could rest content with the bare assertions of things, without the knowledge of their causes; whereby they had made their acts iterable by sober hands, and a standing part of philosophy. Many wise divines hold a reality in the wonders of the Egyptian magicians, and that those magnalia which they performed before Pharaoh were not mere delusions of sense. Rightly to understand how they made serpents out of rods: frogs, and blood of water, were worth half Porta's magic.

Hermolaus Barbarus was scarce in his wits, when, upon conference with a spirit, he would demand no other question than an explication of Aristotle's Entelecheia. Appion, the grammarian, that would raise the ghost of Homer to decide the controversy of his country, made a frivolous and pedantic use of necromancy, and Philostratus did as little, that called up the ghost of Achilles for a particular of the story of Troy. Smarter curiosities would have been at the great elixir, the flux and reflux of the sea, with other noble obscurities in nature; but, probably, all in vain: in matters cognoscible and framed for our disquisition, our industry must be our oracle and reason our Apollo.

Not to know things without the arch of our intellectuals, or what spirits apprehend, is the imperfection of our nature, not our knowledge, and rather inscience than ignorance in man. Revelation might render a great part of the creation easy, which now seems beyond the retch of human indaga

tion; and welcome no doubt from good hands might be a true almagest, and great celestial construction; a clear system of the planetical bodies of the invisible and seeming useless stars unto us; of the many suns in the eighth sphere; what they are; what they contain; and to what more immediately those stupendous bodies are serviceable. But being not hinted in the authentic revelation of God, nor known how far their discoveries are stinted; if they should come unto us from the mouth of evil spirits, the belief thereof might be as unsafe as the enquiry.7

This is a copious subject; but having exceeded the bounds of a letter, I will not now pursue it further.

I am, yours, &c.

TRACT XII. 1

A PROPHECY CONCERNING THE FUTURE STATE OF SEVERAL NATIONS, IN A LETTER WRITTEN UPON OCCASION OF AN OLD PROPHECY SENT TO THE AUTHOR FROM A FRIEND, WITH A REQUEST THAT HE WOULD CONSIDER IT.

SIR,-I take no pleasure in prophecies, so hardly intelligible, and pointing at future things from a pretended spirit of divination; of which sort this seems to be which came unto your hand, and you were pleased to send unto me. And therefore, for your easier apprehension, divertisement,

7 enquiry.] MS. Sloan. adds this sentence," and how far to credit the father of darkness and great obscurer of truth, might yet be obscure unto us." Here the MS. terminates.

1 TRACT XII.] Dr. Johnson remarks, that in this tract the author plainly discovers his expectation to be the same with that entertained lately with more confidence by Dr. Berkley, "that America will be the seat of the fifth empire."

If this alludes to Berkley's favourite "Scheme for Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity," no just comparison can be drawn between it and Browne's speculations on the possible advancement of the New World in political consequence. I can, however, find nothing in

and consideration, I present you with a very different kind of prediction: not positively or peremptorily telling you Berkley about "America becoming the seat of the fifth empire," unless it be in his "Verses on the prospect of planting arts and learning” there;-which he closes, after an allusion to the four ages (viz. of gold, silver, brass, and iron), by anticipating the arrival of a second age of gold, which he terms the "fifth act in the course of empire."

Many of the more important speculations of our author, respecting the New World, remain, after a lapse of nearly two centuries, matter of speculation still ;-though, perhaps, to judge from the course of events since Sir Thomas wrote, we may not unreasonably look forward to their more complete fulfilment.

A very spirited writer in our own days has indulged himself (in the specimen number of The Argus newspaper), with a similar anticipation of events yet (if ever) to come.-By the provisions of that abominationin a land of liberty and literature-the STAMP ACT, it was forbidden to relate real incidents, unless on stamped paper. He therefore filled his paper with imaginary events. Some of his paragraphs relating to "Foreign Affairs" may afford an amusing parallel to the present tract.

Despatches have been this morning received at the Foreign Office, from the allied Greek and Polish army before Moscow, announcing a truce between the allies and the besieged, under the mediation of the federative republic of France. Negotiations for a final pacification are to be immediately entered on, under the joint mediation of Great Britain, France, and Austria; and it is confidently hoped that the united efforts of these powers to put an end to the destructive five years' war, will be finally successful, and will end in the acknowledgment, by the Emperor Nicholas, of the independence of the crown of Warsaw, in the person of Constantine."

"As we gather these facts from what may be considered official sources, we give them this prominent place out of the general order of our foreign news, on which we now enter, however, in detail, having carefully examined all the letters of this morning's mail from our established and exclusive correspondents; not doubting but that many will be a little surprised at the extent and variety, to say nothing of the novelty and interest, of the facts thus for the first time made public."

"United Empire of America.-Since the last census of the United Empire of North and South America, it has been found that the population now amounts to 180,620,000 inhabitants, including the whole country, from Cape Horn to the Frozen Sea; Upper and Lower Canada, as well as Peru and Patagonia, being now incorporated in the Union. The General Senate still holds its Parliament in the magnificent city of Columbus, which reaches quite across the Isthmus of Darien, and has its fortifications washed by the Atlantic on one side, and the Pacific on the other, while the two provincial senates are held at Washington for the north, and at Bolivar for the south, thus preserving the memory of the first great discoverer, and the two greatest patriots, of this magnificent quarter of the globe."

"Turkey.—Since the elevation of Count Capo d'Istria to the throne