526 NATURAL HISTORY. 



thoroughly inquired, whether there be any secret 

 passages of sympathy between persons of near blood, 

 as parents, children, brothers, sisters, nurse-children, 

 husbands, wives, &c, There be many reports in 

 history, that upon the death of persons of such near 

 ness, men have had an inward feeling of it. I myself 

 remember, that being in Paris, and my father dying 

 in London, two or three days before my father s 

 death, I had a dream, which I told to divers English 

 gentlemen, that my father s house in the country 

 was plastered all over with black mortar. There is 

 an opinion abroad, whether idle or no I cannot say, 

 that loving and kind husbands have a sense of their 

 wives breeding children, by some accident in their 

 own body. 



987. Next to those that are near in blood, there 

 may be the like passage, and instincts of nature be 

 tween great friends and enemies : and sometimes the 

 revealing is unto another person, and not to the party 

 himself. I remember Phillippus Commineus, a grave 

 writer, reporteth, that the archbishop of Vienna, a 

 reverend prelate, said one day after mass to king 

 Lewis the eleventh of France : &quot; Sir, your mortal 

 enemy is dead ;&quot; what time duke Charles of Bur 

 gundy was slain at the battle of Granson against the 

 Switzers. Some trial also would be made, whether 

 pact or agreement do any thing ; as if two friends 

 should agree, that such a day in every week, they, 

 being in far distant places, should pray one for an 

 other, or should put on a ring or tablet one for an 

 other s sake ; whether if one of them should break 



