an admirable magnetic virtue instilled, to draw learning, wit, valour, wealth, honour, and women after the owner, just as the 'loadstone does iron. These were used much by the knights-errant, which made them more valiant than giants, and cunning than conjurers; they were always furnished with ladies and damsels; and though we find little mention made of their wealth, yet they always lived at a high rate, when the value of a knight's estate in those times was but a small matter.

They have an admirable way to distinguish the influences of the stars; for among so many myriads of good and bad, that are confused and mixed together, they will presently separate those of virtuous use from the evil, like Boccalini's drum, that would beat up all the weeds in a garden, and leave the herbs standing. These they keep in glasses, like the powder made of the sunbeams, till they have occasion to use them. They are commonly the better half of the great magistery, and serve them to innumerable purposes in all their professions of philosophy, magic, divinity, physic, astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, &c. ; for, besides a rare property they have to restore sinful old age to virtue, youth, and understanding, they are very sovereign to clear the eyes of the mind, and make a blear-eyed intellect see like a cat in the dark, though it be stark blind in the light.

These influences, they would make us believe, are a kind of little invisible midwives, which the stars employ at the nativities of men, to swathe and bind up their spirits, which being then most tender and flexible, they can mould into what form they please: for mixing with the air their first breath, they do not only infect the soul and body, and their faculties, but the tempers, disposition, opinions, actions (and their events) of men with a certain fatal contagion, which,

like a slow-working poison lying still for many years, shall afterwards, like diseases and sores, break out in the several actions and emergencies of their lives. And yet, it should seem, these influences are but a kind of mock-destinies, whose business it is to tamper with all men, but compel none. This the learned call "inclining," not "necessitating." They have a small precarious empire, wholly at the will of the subject; they can raise no men but only volunteers, for their power does not extend to press any. Their jurisdiction is only to invite men to the gallows or the pillory in a civil way, but force none so much as to a whipping, unless, like Catholic penitents, they have a mind to it, and will lay it on themselves. They are very like, if not the same, to the temptations of the devil. They can persuade a man to break his neck, or drown himself, present him with a rope and a dagger, and desire him to make choice of which he pleases; but if they do not take him just in the humour, they may as well go hang themselves. As little good as hurt can they do any man against his will. They cannot make a private man a prince, unless he have a very strong desire to be so; nor make any man happy in any condition whatsoever, unless his own liking concur. They could never put fools in authority, as they used to do, if they did not take delight in it; nor make them great philosophers and profound scholars, unless they pleased themselves with study. As for the wise, the learned tell us, they have nothing to do with them; and if they make any attempt upon them, it is to no purpose: for when they incline a man to be a knave, and prevail upon him, he must be a fool, (for they have no power over the wise,) and so all their labour is lost.

They used to make solemn vows to Almighty God, never to discover the great secret to any person living (as Lully

does) and yet presently will undertake to teach it; but conjure every scholar to keep it to himself, like treason that dies if it take air. Then they forbid them to converse with any that have not faith in the art, that they may hear as little against it as they have to say for it,—an excellent preservative to keep an implicit faith from taking cold. This is the highway of all impostors, who can never do more than another believes. But after so many precepts and rules, delivered with the greatest confidence and presumption of certainty, they will tell you, that this art is not to be attained but by divine revelation, and only to be expected by holy and sanctified persons, that have left behind them all the concernments of this world; whereby it seems, this shadow of art follows those only that fly it, and flies from those that follow it.

A HERALD

Calls himself a king because he has power and authority to hang, draw, and quarter arms; for, assuming a jurisdiction over the distributive justice of titles of honour as far as words extend, he gives himself as great a latitude that way as other magistrates use to do where they have authority, and would enlarge it as far as they can. It is true he can make no lords nor knights of himself, but as many squires and gentlemen as he pleases, and adopt them into what family they have a mind. His dominions abound with all sorts of cattle, fish, and fowl, and all manner of manufactures, besides whole fields of gold and silver, which he magnificently bestows upon his followers, or sells as cheap as lands in Jamaica. The language they use is barbarous, as being but a dialect of pedlar's French or the Egyptian, though of a

loftier sound, and in the propriety affecting brevity, as the other does verbosity. His business is like that of all the schools—to make plain things hard with perplexed methods and insignificant terms, and then appear learned in making them plain again. He professes arms not for use but ornament only, and yet makes the basest things in the world weapons of good and worshipful bearings. He is wiser than the fellow that sold his ass, but kept the shadow for his own use; for he sells 'only the shadow (that is the picture) and keeps the ass himself. He makes pedigrees as apothecaries do medicines, when they put in one ingredient for another that they have not by them: by this means he often makes strange matches. His chief province is at funerals, where he commands in chief, marshals the tristitia irritamenta, and, like a gentleman-sewer to the worms, serves up the feast with all punctual formality. He will join as many shields together as would make a Roman testudo or Macedonian phalanx, to fortify the nobility of a new made lord, that will pay for the impresting of them, and allow him coat and conduct money. He is a kind of a necromancer, and can raise the dead out of their graves to make them marry and beget those they never heard of in their lifetime. His coat is like the king of Spain's dominions, all skirts, and hangs as loose about him; and his neck is the waist, like the picture of nobody, with his breeches fastened to his collar. He will sell the head or a single joint of a beast or fowl as dear as the whole body, like a pig's head in Bartholomew fair, and after put off the rest to his customers at the same rate. His arms being utterly out of use in war, since guns came up, have been translated to dishes and cups, as the ancients used their precious stones, according to the poet-"Gemmas ad po

cula transfert a gladiis," &c., and since are like to decay every day more and more; for since he gave citizens coats of arms, gentlemen have made bold to take their letters of marque by way of reprisal. The hangman has a receipt to mar all his work in a moment; for, by nailing the wrong end of an escutcheon upwards upon a gibbet, all the honour and gentility extinguishes of itself like a candle that is held with the flame downwards. Other arms are made for the spilling of blood; but his only purify and cleanse it like scurvy-grass, for a small dose taken by his prescription will refine that which is as base and gross as bull's blood (which the Athenians used to poison withal) to any degree of purity.

AN INTELLIGENCER

Would give a penny for any statesman's thought at any time. He travels abroad to guess what princes are designing by seeing them at church or dinner; and will undertake to unriddle a government at first sight, and tell what plots she goes with, male or female; and discover, like a mountebank, only by seeing the public face of affairs, what private marks there are in the most secret parts of the body politic. He is so ready at reasons of state, that he has them, like a lesson, by rote; but as charlatans make diseases fit their medicines, and not their medicines diseases, so he makes all public affairs conform to his own established reason of state, and not his reason though the case alter ever so much comply with them. He thinks to obtain a great insight into state affairs by observing only the outside pretences and appearances of things, which are seldom or never true, and may be resolved several ways all equally

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