Is one that expounds upon the planets and teaches to construe the
accidents by the due joining of stars in construction. He talks with
them by dumb signs, and can tell what they mean by their twinkling and
squinting upon one another as well as they themselves. He is a spy upon
the stars, and can tell what they are doing by the company they keep and
the houses they frequent. They have no power to do anything alone until
so many meet as will make a quorum. He is clerk of the committee to
them, and draws up all their orders that concern either public or
private affairs. He keeps all their accounts for them, and sums them up,
not by debtor, but creditor alone--a more compendious way. They do ill
to make them have so much authority over the earth, which perhaps has as
much as any one of them but the sun, and as much right to sit and vote
in their councils as any other. But because there are but seven Electors
of the German Empire, they will allow of no more to dispose of all
other, and most foolishly and unnaturally dispossess their own parent of
its inheritance rather than acknowledge a defect in their own rules.
These rules are all they have to show for their title, and yet not one
of them can tell whether those they had them from came honestly by them.
Virgil's description of fame, that reaches from earth to the stars, _tam
ficti pravique tenax_, to carry lies and knavery, will serve astrologers
without any sensible variation. He is a fortune-seller, a retailer of
destiny, and petty chapman to the planets. He casts nativities as
gamesters do false dice, and by slurring and palming sextile, quartile,
and trine, like _six, quatre, trois_, can throw what chance he pleases.
He sets a figure as cheats do a main at hazard, and gulls throw away
their money at it. He fetches the grounds of his art so far off, as well
from reason as the stars, that, like a traveller, he is allowed to lie
by authority; and as beggars that have no money themselves believe all
others have, and beg of those that have as little as themselves, so the
ignorant rabble believe in him though he has no more reason for what he
professes than they.