Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/751

Arthur Young, Lord Chesterfield, and William Cobbett, 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 fearing 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 dictate 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 commands 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 profoundly disrespectable. He quarrelled with his best friends for frivolously 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 scruple, 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 profligacy. He predicted that Germany and France would fight, and that France would be utterly put down. He predicted that the line of fortifications 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 Vendôme 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