Munro, the Scotch soldier of fortune, who bore himself so gallantly in the wars of Gustavus Adolphus, tells a story of a vision that was seen by a soldier of his company on the morning of the storm of Stralsund in 1628. One Murdo Macleod, born in Assen, a soldier of tall stature and valiant courage, being sleeping on his watch, awoke at break of day, and “jogged” two of his comrades lying by him, much to their indignation at his “stirring them.” He replied: “Before long, you shall be otherwise stirred.” A soldier called Allan Tough, a Lochaber man, recommending his soul to God, asked him what he had seen: “That you shall never behold your country again.” The other replied, the loss was but small, if the rest of the company were well. He answered: “No, for there was great hurt and dearth of many very near.” The other again asked, what others he had seen who would perish. He then told by name sundry of his comrades who would be killed. The other asked, what would become of himself. Eventually, he described by their clothes all the officers who would be hurt. “A pretty quick boy near by,” asked him, what would become of the Major (that is, Munro himself?) “He would be shot, but not deadly,” was the answer,—and so it proved.
A good deal is said of this Taisch, or “Second Sight,” in Dr. Johnson’s “Journey to the Hebrides,” and some striking anecdotes are told. It was just the thing to interest his moody temperament, with its terrible dread of death and its longing to lift the curtain that hides from us the Unseen. He seems, however, to have been unable to convince himself of the actual existence of such a power; all the evidence he could collect failed to advance his curiosity to conviction, so that he could not believe, while remaining willing to believe. To use the noble words of Goethe, nobly rendered by Coleridge:
“As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in To-day already walks To-morrow.”
This it is not difficult to accept. It seems fitting that presages should herald the death of kings and the revolutions of nations; but the mind cannot convince itself that the spirits of the dead will cross the shadowy borders to foretell the trivial accidents that chequer ordinary lives. Yet, as Johnson says: “A man on a journey far from home falls from a horse; another who is perhaps at work about the house, sees him bleeding on the ground, commonly with a landscape of the place where the accident befalls him. Another seer, driving home his cattle, or wandering in idleness, or musing in the sunshine, is suddenly surprised by the appearance of a bridal ceremony or funeral procession, and counts the mourners or attendants, of whom, if he knows them, he relates the names, if he knows them not he can describe the dresses.”
Woodrow tells of “a popish lady,” living near Boroughbridge, who dreamed that she saw a coach, and a lady in it, almost lost in the river. She directed her servants to watch during two nights, to guard against an accident, but nothing happened. “On the third night, pretty late, the Lady Shawfield came, and of a sudden the coach was overturned, and filled with water. The coachman got upon one of the horses, to save his life. The good and religious Lady Shawfield was for some time under water: and upon the cry rising, the popish lady’s servants came to their assistance. With much difficulty, the coach and lady in it were got out of the water.” And the Lady Shawfield, being laid upon the bank, gradually recovered her senses.
In the early months of the Commonwealth, while Mackenzie of Tarbat, afterwards Earl of Cromarty, was riding in a field among his tenants, who were manuring barley, a stranger “called that way on his foot, and stopped likewise, and said to the countrymen, ‘You need not be so busy about that barley, for I see the Englishmen’s horses tethered among it; and other parts mowed down for them.’ Tarbet asked him how he knew them to be Englishmen, and if he had ever seen any of them? He said, ‘No; but he saw them strangers, and heard the English were in Scotland, and guessed it could be no other than they.’ In the month of July, the thing happened directly as the man said he saw it.”
The influence exercised on the imagination by events in which we are deeply interested, and the manner in which our hopes or fears are mistaken for predictions, may be illustrated by two examples from antiquity. On the day that Cæsar and Pompey contended at Pharsalia for the mastery of the world, Cornelius, a priest and patrician of Padua, declared, under a sudden impulse of passion, that he beheld the eddies and currents of a desperate battle, and the fall and flight of many of the combatants, eventually exclaiming: “Cæsar has conquered!” His hearers laughed at him, but his words were afterwards verified, and it appeared that he had foretold not only the day, but the incidents, and the result of the famous battle in Thessaly. The anecdote is related on the authority of the “Noctes Atticæ” of Aulus Gellius.
Dio Cassius tells a similar story about the assassination of the Emperor Domitian at Rome, by his freedman Stephanus. “It is to be admired,” he says, “that, as accurately proved by persons in either place, Apollonius Thyanæus, ascending an eminence at Ephesus or elsewhere, cried out before the multitude: ‘Well done, Stephanus, well done! Strike the murderer! thou hast struck him, thou hast wounded him, he is slain!’” But it may well be supposed that a secret understanding existed between Apollonius and the murderer.
From “second sight” we pass on to “prediction” or “divination,” another of the superstitious modes by which humanity has endeavoured to read the book of the Future. In the north this power of prophecy was largely assumed by women, a circumstance of which Scott has made ample and picturesque use in more than one of his admirable fictions.