BARBARA, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND, AND COUNTESS OF CASTLEMAINE.

SIR,-The beautiful portrait of the Duchess, by Lely, mentioned by Neale in his "Views of Seats" as at Murthly Castle, Perthshire, was sold by auction at Edinburgh after the death of Sir William Drummond Stewart, in 1871, along with other of the deceased Baronet's personal property; and, as eight of the portraits sold along with it were described in the catalogue simply as "A lady," nobody knows what has become of it. The present owner of Murthly Castle, Sir Archibald Stewart, of Grandtully, thus describes it from memory: It was a head and bust, with beautiful face, and eyes peculiarly so, and the skin on the neck and part of the breast likewise. The head had a good deal of hair; and the whole air was slightly voluptuous, as was the case generally, I think, in the period of Charles II."

Can any of your writers throw any light on the whereabouts of this picture? Yours,

HADDON HALL.

A. D. S.

SIR, Before many months are over summer will be upon us; visitors to the highlands of Derbyshire will be numerous; and few of them wi'l be content to leave the archæological beauties of Haddon Hall unseen. To such of these as are not strong in genealogy a word of caution will be well given, lest they should receive the tale of Dorothy Vernon's romantic love passage from the mouth of the fair guides of the present hospitable owner, or from the pages of the official guide-book, without the admixture of several grains of salt.

They must bear in mind that Dorothy was not a younger daughter, but the elder co-heiress. That her denied alliance with John Manners was every whit as good a match as her sister's with a gentleman of no greater estate. That the Romeo and Juliet part of the story is a highly poetical embellishment, and that the Rutland peerage has no part in the history of Haddon for nearly a century after this date. They should look with suspicion upon the "contemporary" nomenclature of the State parlours, remembering that dining, drawing, and ball-rooms were institutions of quite modern date, and may exercise their ingenuity in the attempt to decide which of these three was once the "great chamber" of the house. Lastly, they should give a thought to the romantic history of the younger male branch of the Vernons, one of whom was the famous claimant of the Powis peerage, and another son-in-law to the judge of the same name. The baptismal expenses on account of the latter's heir were recorded in THE ANTIQUARIAN MAGAZINE for December, 1882, and may be remembered in connection with the cradle of the first Earl of Rutland -enshrined, with a naiveté which would once have cost some people their liberties, if not their heads, beside the sacred couch of the Virgin Queen in the state bed-chamber of Haddon Hall. H. H.

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

THE Editor declines to pledge himself for the safety or return of MSS. voluntarily tendered to him by strangers.

C. H. WALL and H. ECKROYD SMITH are referred to the report of Howard v. Harris, in The Times of Feb. 7, in which it is ruled that an Editor is not bound to return MSS. voluntarily tendered to him by strangers.

Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographer.

NORMAN ARCHITECTURE: THE ROUND CHURCH, CAMBRIDGE.

(From Mollett's "Words used in Art and Archæology." See page 198.)

The

Antiquarian Magazine & Bibliographer.

Forecastings of Nostradamus.

PART I.

"A prophet says nothing of his own, but everything which he says is strange and prompted by someone else." (Philo, Bohn's ed., ii. 146.)

T has been said, and not altogether without reason, that to attribute a gift of prophecy to a particular inspiration from the Deity is an opinion liable to the most fearful consequences. It is all very well when the prophet happens to belong to the dominant religion of his country. He may then escape fairly well, perhaps; but should he happen to be a Dissenter, of some sect in a weak minority, he will soon be told that his inspiration emanates from the devil, and relighting the faggots of Smithfield and Torquemada, he will expiate his foresight as a sorcerer and magician.

The oracles of old are by the Christian fathers mostly set down to the incitement of the devil, and Milton in his "Paradise Lost" makes the fiends in Pandemonium speak through and possess the idols. Vossius allows it was the devil who spoke in oracles, but the devil was mightily embarrassed by the questions, not being clear quite upon future events, so that he studied ambiguity and spoke in double meanings. To this we may well say, "O foolish devil," when he did not take Job's wife, as he would have received her in duplicate when all else returned doubled to him with returning prosperity. But the three distinguished fathers, St. Thomas, St. Jerome, VOL. V.-NO. 28.

they take to invective, if not with St. Peter to cursing and swearing in asseveration of the untruths they have heretofore been repeating so constantly. It is difficult to study and not to get puffed up with study. Learned men are not wise men necessarily; the wise man, the more he learns, knows the more fully how very little he can know at the best, all summed, and as his learning grows profound his modesty grows the deeper with it.

It was not the ignorant who withstood Columbus when he wished for three caravels to explore the West and open India up, but the pick of the savants of his day. The same class of men stopped Copernicus and thwarted Harvey. The same class of men tormented Galileo. The Sorbonne beat Ramus out of Paris because (anticipating Bacon) he called in question the Aristotelian logic. He was received at Heidelberg with honours, embraced Protestantism, and lastly was offered by Charles IX. an asylum at Fontainebleau ; but they burned his library, and then took his life at St. Bartholomew's. How fared it with Kepler? They let him die in want. With Descartes? who should have been, as methodist of methodisers, most after their own heart. Why, the threat of blazing faggots grew so hot upon him that he was thrust from his quiet retreat to the cold sky and sluggish waters of free Holland. It was the savant handed the hemlock cup to Socrates, and the Stagirite who was used against Ramus, to shun a like fate, had to escape into a voluntary exile. Oh true, it is most true, that those who by impulsion seek the truth find little or no sympathy from their contemporaries. As the Bardic Triad says, "There are three things in which by the justice of God every living being shares. The first is co-sufferance with Him in the circle of Abred" (or transmigration), "the privilege of divine love, and final union with Him." It is a sad thing to see what others see not, and to lose friendship by trying to bless. But yet there is that in truth, and the pursuit of truth, so goodly, that the soul once possessed with its strong impulse will go forward to the burning flame; no moth, but consciously, and add its little fuel to the universal light, consumed yet brightening. Bitter though it be, what better death has man than this? Do we not feel that Erasmus who refused the full conclusions, and went no further than a shaft of wit or touch of satire would carry him, with all his brilliant learning and elegance of manner, fails us of a manly satisfaction, and we wish he had done a little more or a little less for such celebrity as his. The head seems where it should be quite, but we should like the veins fuller whilst the blood is coursing, that we might feel the pulses

beat at the heart and wrist and thumb, and know we had a man to talk with, and not a book and ink-bottle.

Science is always advanced by men who break its rules, or turn them inside out, or read them backwards in an order that is reversed. This ought to make the learned coteries who think in stereotype grow modest. So ought the perception of Rousseau upon medicine to work out modesty, for it is equally applicable to all the sciences, that there is more to fear from the practitioner of science than hope of aid from any resources that science may place at his disposal.*

The everyday occurrences of our life are only repeating miracles, they are not the less but the more wonderful that they are quotidian. The learned are more stupid in this than the ignorant. Seeing a thing to happen daily over a long period, they come to watch only the consecutive association till they lose sight of the miracle, call it a consequence, and at last elevate it into a law, and then into a law of nature which they figure to themselves as immutable. It is true that the sequences run to length and are rarely changed, but to suppose that they cannot be changed is to shut the Maker out of His own universe, and to undermine all possible faith in man, for the basis of faith is a first cause, and in this sense Bailey says well in "Festus," "Every believer is God's miracle."

This, again, ought to inculcate more modesty in science. Also, it is great presumption to think that the learned are yet acquainted with all the powers that lie in the universe or in man. There is much faculty and power yet wrapped up in humanity, and talent that will in time divulge itself, and amongst these is a spirit of forecast or prophecy. Except that we are familiar with memory as a power of the mind, and as one of the triad with will and reason, it would not be much more startling to find we could catch some of the pinnacle-facts coming up in the future than to see similar facts fading out of view in the backward distance. The Brahmins and the Easterns generally hold that such is the fact, and the analogous belief still clings to the old Celtic races of the West. Prophets, witches, wizards, gipsies, Van Helmonts, and Swedenborgs still will not let the instinct die out from among us. Inductive reasoning is but a poor thing in comparison-the lesser half of man's mentality. The larger and the better half is instinct that nothing gives and nothing takes away, that learns without studying, and leaps by assault where logic fails to

* "Car j'ai beaucoup plus à craindre des erreurs de l'artiste qu'à espérer des secours de l'art."