Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Astrology

This considered together with a strict account and critical examen of reason, will also distract the witty determinations of astrology.

He strictly adviseth not to begin to sow before the setting of the stars; which, notwithstanding, without injury to agriculture cannot be observed in England.

Towards the latter end of this month, September, Charles will begin to recover his perfect health, according to his nativity, which, casting it myself, I am sure is true, and all things hitherto have happened accordingly to the very time that I predicted them.

Astrology, however, against which so much of the satire [in Hudibras] is directed was not more the folly of Puritans than of others. It had in that time a very extensive dominion. Its predictions raised hopes and fears in minds which ought to have rejected it with contempt. In hazardous undertakings care was taken to begin under the influence of a propitious planet; and when the king was prisoner in Carisbrook Castle, an astrologer was consulted what hour would be found most favourable to an escape.

Figure-flingers and star-gazers pretend to foretell the fortunes of kingdoms, and have no foresight in what concerns themselves.

Do not Christians and Heathens, Jews and Gentiles, poets and philosophers, unite in allowing the starry influences?

Their skill in astronomy dwindled into that which, by a great catachresis, is called judicial astrology.

Astrological prayers seem to me to be built on as good reason as the predictions.

Astrologers with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets, to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.

I know the learned think of the art of astrology that the stars do not force the actions or wills of men.

A wise man shall overrule his stars, and have a greater influence upon his own content than all the constellations and planets of the firmament.

Whenever the word influence occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a modern date, there is always more or less remote allusion to the skyey or planetary influences supposed to be exercised by the heavenly bodies upon men.

We speak of a person as jovial, or saturnine, or mercurial. Jovial, as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and the happiest augury of all. A gloomy person was said to be saturnine, as being born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those that owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself. Another we call mercurial, that is light-hearted, as those born under the planet Mercury were accounted to be.