for singular favours and interprets to his own
advantage, though it never goes further; for, all his employments being
public, he is never admitted to any private services, and they despise
him as not woman's meat; for he applies to too many to be trusted by any
one, as bastards by having many fathers have none at all. He goes often
mounted in a coach as a convoy to guard the ladies, to take the dust in
Hyde Park, where by his prudent management of the glass windows he
secures them from beggars, and returns fraught with China-oranges and
ballads. Thus he is but a gentleman-usher-general, and his business is
to carry one lady's services to another, and bring back the other's
in exchange.

AN ASTROLOGER

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,