The position of Nostradamus In his own age and among his own people was eminently respectable, and on other grounds than his oracular endowments. He was an educated, regular, and successful practitioner of medicine. His sons obtained honorable distinction in the province in which they had been born and brought up. There Is no stain on the character of the man or of his family. There Is an air of sincerity in the decla- rations of Nostradamus, even when most extravagant, that induces hesitation In ascribing them to shameless effrontery and imposture. He seems on many occasions to claim divine Inspiration, and It Is freely accorded to him by his apologist ; but he usually ascribes his pre- vision to mathematical science and to astrological cal- culation. He evidently trusted much to luck ; and es- pecially to the luck of being perfectly incomprehensible In his thoroughly impenetrable farrago of names, sym- bols, types, and dark utterances. He had also great confidence In congenital adaptation for his marvellous mission, in his ancestral gifts, and in "the hereditary word of occult predictions." There was a craze In the blood, which both favored self-delusion and presented the appearance of honest Intent.
There Is, however, one broad shadow of conscious concealment and Insincerity which lies over the whole series of these Centuries. He constantly denounces the Reformers and the Ileformed religion, and predicts their confusion and overthrow — no erroneous forecast, so far as France was concerned. He died In the avowed pro- fession of the old faith, though he had apparently lived with little regard to the external requirements of any religion. He was buried In a monastic church. Nev- ertheless there is a hint In his writings that his real sentiments were In strong opposition to all these indica- tions of belief, and that, like his contemporary, Rabe- lais, he disguised his actual though lukewarm opinions in a cloud of enigmatical sentences, or cloaked them by disingenuous signs. He says, in his Prefator}' Letter, " that if I should relate what should hajipen hereafter, those of the present reign, sect, religion, and faith would
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find it so disagreeing with their fancies that they would condemn that which future ages shall find and know to be true, . . . which hath been the cause that I have withdrawn my tongue from the vulgar and my pen from paper. But afterwards I was willing to enlarge myself in dark and abstruse sentences, declaring the fut- ure events; chiefly the most urgent, and those which I foresaw (wli^tever human mutation happened) would not offend the hearers, all under dark figures more than prophetical." The last sentence is very significant, and the parenthesis somewhat singular for a professed prophet.
It would be venturing much too far to suspect Nos- tradamus of any real attachment to the cause of the Reformation ; but, in the midst of a population with Protestant proclivities in tlie south of France, he may have acquired a distaste for Catholicism, and, prophet as he was, may have expected or apprehended the ulti- mate overthrow of the ancient creed. It is not so much as an illustration of his religious views as it is for a manifestation of intentional deception that this incon- sistency has been noted.
Tliis inconsistency, if such it be, is by no means the only incongruity which occurs in the prophetic volume of Nostradamus. Many of his quatrains were mani- festly composed after the events to which they seem designed to refer. Some predictions can be discerned to be unquestionably false. On the other hand, it must be admitted that many have met with apparently mar- vellous accomplishment. This may be due to that luck which the seer recognised as a genuine constituent of prophetic inspiration ; or it may be due to the impossi- bility of missing everything, ^vhen the arrows, though shot in the dark, are launched in every conceivable di- rection. The chief explanation, however, probably is that the expression is so loose and vague that it occa- sionally admits of application to subsequent transac- tions, wholly foreign to any prevision of the prophet. The instances of such agreement between the vaticina- tion and the occurrence are often very singular.
4. Prophecies shxingely accomplished. — It is not meant that there is anything more than an accidental coinci- dence between the prophecies of Nostradamus and the events by which they have been ostensibl}' verified. The verification is ascribed to no inspiration, to no nat- ural or supernatural endowments, to no astrologj', to no other science or art, but to that supreme source of Nos- tradamus's renown — to luck {Diva Fo7-tiina). With this explanation, there is much interest in noting a few of the remarkable and often clear instances of the reali- zation of these prophecies. Thus, too, will be afforded some slight taste of the peculiar flavor, some knowledge of the curious fabric of his prophetic strains.
Attention has already been directed to the prophecy — strained in its application — of the manner of Henry H's death, which, more than anything else, heightened the reputation and credit of Nostradamus. That which was fitted to Crom\vcll was scarcely less celebrated a centurj^ later:
" Dn regne Anglois le digne dchasse, Le conseiller jiar ire mis a fen. Ses adherents iront si bas tracer t^ue le bastard sera demy receu" (Hi, S2).