Note 1 — Chapter I

: Hearne's Ductor Historicus, 1714 (for the old doctrine of the Four Monarchies); Thomason Pamphlets; Carlyle's Cromwell, III. 24-27.—The Fifth Monarchy notion was by no means an upstart oddity of thought among the English Puritans of the seventeenth century. It was a tradition of the most scholarly thought of mediæval theologians as to the duration and final collapse of the existing Cosmos; and it may be traced in the older imaginative literature of various European nations. Thus the Scottish Sir David Lindsay's long poem entitled Monarchy, or Ane Dialogue betwix Experience and one Courtier of the Miserable Estate of the World, the date of which is 1553, is a moralized sketch of the whole previous history of the world, according to the then accepted doctrine of the Four past Secular Monarchies, with a glance around at the Europe of Lindsay's own time as already certainly in the dregs of "The Latter Days," and an anticipation, as if with assured personal belief, of a glorious Fifth Monarchy, or miraculous reconstitution of the whole Universe into a new Heaven and Earth, to begin probably about the year 2000.