Hudibras

CHAPTER  III

     Do not the hist'ries of all ages

     Relate miraculous presages

     Of strange turns in the world's affairs,

     Foreseen by astrologers, soothsayers,

     Chaldeans, learned genethliacs,

     And some that have writ almanacks?

          Hudibras.

The text above, from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, forms the motto to chapter III of Walter Scott’s “Guy Mannering”.  All the factions of the English Civil War appear in “Hudibras”.  English poet Samuel Butler was born on February 8, 1612.