2 6o POPULAR BELIEFS. 



followed their example, and were also anxious to have their horoscopes 

 taken. It was in the stars and the planets, in the revolutions of the sun and 

 the moon, that Nostradamus claimed to be able to read the destinies of men 

 and of nations. He composed, after his pretended astronomical observations, 

 an unintelligible sort of conjuring book in rhymed verse, teeming with 

 hybrid words and foreign names, and he made many additions to it up to the 

 date of his death in 1556. The form of these prophecies (Fig. 188) made it 

 very easy to find them applicable more or less clearly to all the events of 

 history, and this sustained the reputation of the astrologer of Salon long 

 after his death. 



But Nostradamus, in his collection of Sibylline oracles, dealt only with 

 the fate of kings, princes, and nations, and he was succeeded by a number of 

 less pretentious astrologers who prepared gencthliatics, or horoscopes, upon 

 interrogation of the stars, for all those who came to them with money. These 

 astrologers had for competitors the dicincrs, who made it their business to 

 interpret visions and dreams, and who could trace back the origin of their 

 profession to a very remote period. With all ancient peoples, and notably 

 with the children of Israel, dreams were looked upon as anticipated reflections 

 of the future, as divine or diabolical warnings, whether in disclosing without 

 concealment or enigma the things which were destined to occur, or whether 

 concealing beneath a sombre and mysterious veil the spectre of destiny. The 

 Church did not, as a rule, do more than declare that dreams were two kinds 

 sometimes sent by God, sometimes wrought by the demon. Thus, according 

 to the writers of the period, there was no important event in the Middle Ages, 

 or even subsequently to the Renaissance, which was not announced by a dream. 



The day before Henry II. was struck down by the blow of a lance during 

 the tournament, Catherine de' Medicis, his wife, dreamt that she saw him 

 lose one of his eyes. Three days before he fell beneath the knife of 

 Jacques Clement, Henry III. dreamt that he saw the royal insignia 

 stained with blood and trodden under foot by monks and people of the 

 lower classes. A few days before he was murdered by Ravaillac, Henry IV. 

 heard during the night his wife, Marie de' Medicis, say to herself, as she 

 awoke, "Dreams are but falsehoods !" and when he asked her what she had 

 dreamt, she replied, " That you were stabbed upon the steps of the Little 

 Louvre ! " " Thank God it is but a dream," rejoined the King. 



The death of Henry IV., like that of Julius Caesar, was, moreover, pre- 



