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Ben Jonson's Prevision

Categories: OMENS AND PHANTASMS
Scary Books: The Haunters & The Haunted
: DRUMMOND'S "Conversations"

Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that "when the king came to

England, about the time that plague was in London, he being in the

country, at Sir Robert Cotton's house with old Cambden, he saw in a

vision his eldest son, then a young child and at London, appear unto him

with the mark of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cut

with a sword, at which amazed he prayed unto God, and in the morning he

came unto Mr Cambden's chamber to tell him, who persuaded him it was but

an apprehension, at which he should not be dejected. In the meantime

there came letters from his wife of the death of that boy in the plague.

He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that growth he

thinks he shall be at the resurrection."



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