SECULAR PROPHECY. 733 



Arthur Young, Lord Chesterfield, and William Co-bbett, are not 

 exactly the kind of men whom we should expect to find among the 

 prophets. Arthur Young was a shrewd traveller, with a keen eye for 

 leading facts, and a remarkable power of describing what he saw in 

 plain, homely words. Chesterfield was a literary and philosophical 

 dandy, who, richly furnished with the small coin of wisdom, and fear- 

 ing nothing so much as indecorum, would have been a great teacher 

 if the earth had been a drawing-room. Cobbett was a coarse, rough 

 English farmer, with an extraordinary power of reasoning at the dic- 

 tate of his prejudices, and with such a faculty of writing racy, vigorous 

 English as excites the admiration and the despair of scholars. It seems 

 almost ludicrous to speak of such men as prophets. And yet Arthur 

 Young foretold the coming of the French Revolution at a time when 

 the foremost men of France did not dream that the greatest of political 

 convulsions was soon to lay low the proudest of monarchies. And the 

 dandified morality of Lord Chesterfield did not prevent him from 

 making a similar prediction. Cobbett made a guess which was still 

 more notable ; for, at the beginning of the present century, he foretold 

 the secession of the Southern States. But the most remarkable of all 

 the secular prophets who have spoken to our time is Heine. He might 

 seem indeed to have been a living irony on the very name of prophet, 

 for he read backward all the sanctities of religion and all the com- 

 mands of the moral law. Essentially a humorist, to whom life seemed 

 now the saddest of mysteries, and now the most laughable of jokes, he 

 made sport of every thing that he touched. His most fervid English 

 devotee, Mr. Matthew Arnold, is forced to admit that he was pro- 

 foundly disrespectable. He quarrelled with his best friends for frivo- 

 lously petty reasons, and he repaid their kindness by writing lampoons 

 which are masterpieces at once of literary skill and of malignity. 

 Neither Voltaire nor Pope scattered calumnies with such a lack of scru- 

 ple, and Byron himself was not a more persistent or more systematic 

 voluptuary. Yet Heine was so true a prophet that his predictions 

 might have been accounted the work of inspiration if he had been as 

 famed for piety or purity as he was notorious for irreligion and profli- 

 gacy. He predicted that Germany and France would fight, and that 

 France would be utterly put down. He predicted that the line of for- 

 tifications which M. Thiers was then building round Paris would draw 

 to the capital a great hostile army, and that they would crush the 

 city as if they were a contracting iron shroud. He predicted that the 

 Communists would some day get the upper hand in Paris, that they 

 would strike in a spirit of fiendish rage at the statues, the beautiful 

 buildings, and all the other tangible marks of the civilization which 

 they sought to destroy ; that they would throw down the VendCme 

 Column in their hate of the man who had made France the foe of 

 every other people ; and that they would further show their execration 

 for his memory by taking his ashes from the Invalides and flinging 



