"I was still half asleep, and once more closed my eyes. The dream returned. The lion, still annoyed by the pen, began to roar with all his might so that the whole city of Rome and all the states of the Roman Empire began to see what the matter was. The Pope requested them to oppose this monk and applied particularly to me, on account of his being in my country. I again woke, repeated the Lord's Prayer, entreated God to reserve his Holiness and once more fell asleep.

"Then I dreamed that all the Princes of the empire, and we among them, hastened to Rome, and strove, one after another, to break the pen; but the more we tried the stiffer it became, sounding as if it had been made of iron. We at length desisted. I then asked the monk (for I was sometimes at Rome and sometimes at Wittenburg) where he got his pen and why it was so strong. The pen,' replied he, 'belonged to an old goose of Bohemia one hundred years old. I got it from my old schoolmasters. As to the strength, it is owing to the impossibility of depriving it of its pith or its marrow, and I am quite astonished at it myself.' Suddenly I heard a loud noise; a large number of other pens had sprung out of the long pen of the monk. ... I awoke a third time; it was daylight."

The tragic death of William Rufus of England was foretold in divers dreams. Anselm, the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, saw the occurrence in a vision, and also "A lay-brother belonging to the Abbey of St. Peter at Gloucester was likewise visited by a prophetic dream. Besides there was Ful-chered, a zealot monk and an eloquent expositor of the Holy Scriptures, about this time in the Kalends of August spoke prophetically about the matter."

Each of these dreamers beheld William Rufus mortally wounded by an arrow; the most frightful of the premonitory visions, however, was that of a foreign monk, a relative of Robert Fitzhamon. ". . . He saw William Rufus come into a church, with his usual menacing and insolent gestures, looking contemptuously on the standers-by, and gnaw the legs and arms of Jesus Christ on the crucifix. The image bore this for some time, but at length struck the king with its foot in such a manner that he fell backwards. Then such volumes of flame burst from his mouth that the smoke blackened the sky." Robert Fitzhamon thought it right to tell this dream to the king, who heard it with shouts of laughter. 'He is a monk,' he exclaimed, 'and dreams for money, give him a hundred pence !' Still he hesitated a long time before going hunting and did not go till after dinner, having taken a more than usual quantity of wine." - William of Malmesbury.

Eusebius in his "Ecclesiastical History" gives a circumstantial account of the king's death and the attending portents.

"On being informed of them (the dreams) the venerable Abbot Serlo wrote letters which he dispatched in a friendly spirit from Gloucester, informing the king very distinctly of all that the monk had seen in his vision. . . . Being in great spirits the king was joking with his attendants while his boots were being laced, when an armorer came and presented to him six arrows. The king immediately took them with great satisfaction, praising the work; and, unconscious of what was to happen kept four of them himself, and held out the other two to Walter Tirel. 'It is but right,' he said, 'that the sharpest arrows should be given to him who knows best to inflict mortal wounds with them.' . . . The king's words on receiving Abbot Serlo's letter concluded with: 'Does he think I follow the example of the English, who will defer their journey or their business on account of the dreams of a parcel of wheezing old women? "

King Henry the First was himself tormented with strange dreams. In one he saw a multitude of plowmen with their tools, followed by soldiers with their weapons and after these came bishops with their crozier staves; all seemed ready to fall upon the king, so much so that he sprang from his bed and called his servants around to defend him. This dream, we are told, had a magical effect upon the brother of Rufus. In the words of the chronicler: "Thus we may see that the two sons of the Conqueror had each been warned by dreams: the one disregarded the warning, and met his death; the other (as the learned do gather) improved the occasion and reformed his life." - Chronicles of England, Ireland and Scot-' land.

Catherine de Medici's fame as a dreamer was shared by other members of her family. Her son, Henry the Third, dreamed that he had lost the crown jewels and all the royal paraphernalia or that they were trampled underfoot and crushed by the feet of religious men and of the people. This dream was interpreted as auguring personal danger and Henry himself accepted it seriously and endeavored to avoid every risk. Nevertheless, he was murdered three days after his prophetic vision. Henry the Fourth had numerous ominous dreams before his assassination, and the stormy path of his consort, Maria de Medici, was portrayed to her in dreams. She has written: "For myself I declare that every signal accident of my life, happy or not, has been presaged me by a dream or otherwise."

In her celebrated dream not long after her marriage she saw the brilliant gems of her crown change into pearls, the recognized symbols of mourning. This was just prior to the king's assassination.

Besides Queen Catherine's dream before the Battle of Jarnac, already mentioned, she was visited by a portentous vision in connection with the death of her husband, Henry the Second, of France. The day before the king was killed she saw him walking with bowed head and faltering steps through the streets of Paris, while the multitude followed mourning for him. It is said that she begged him on bended knees not to join the tourney that next day, but he insisted upon entering the lists against the Count of Montgomery. The king was but slightly wounded, yet he died two weeks later. Her own death the great Queen distinctly beheld in a dream two weeks before its actual occurrence.