the moon sells,
To whom all people, far and near,
On deep importances repair.

* * * * *

Do not our great reformers use
This Sidrophel to forebode news?
To write of victories next year,
And castles taken yet i' the air?
Of battles fought at sea, and ships
Sunk two years hence--the great eclipse?
A total overthrow given the king
In Cornwall, horse and foot, next spring?'

Thus much, and more, wrote Butler in his 'Hudibras' of William Lilly,
who was famous in London during that eventful period of English history
from the time of Charles I, onward through the Commonwealth and the
Protectorate, to the Restoration: a time of civil commotions and wars,
when political parties and religious sects, striving for mastery, or
struggling for existence, made the lives and estates of men insecure,
and their outlook in many respects a troubled one. Lifelong connections
of families and neighbors were then rudely severed, and doubt, distrust,
and discontent filled all minds, or most. Of this widespread commotion
London was the active centre; and there a judgment of God, called the
plague, had, in the year 1625, desolated whole streets. The timid,
time-serving, faithless, a wavering host, peered anxiously into the
future, eager to know what might be hidden there, so that they could
shape their course accordingly for safety or for profit. Finding their
own short vision inadequate, they turned for aid to the professional
prophets of that troublous time--magicians who could call forth spirits
and make them speak, or astrologers who could read the stars, and show
how the great Disposer of events could be forestalled. These discoverers
of the hidden, disclosers of the future, though branded now as
impostors, were not therefore worse than their dupes; for in all ages
the two classes, deceivers and deceived, are essentially alike;
positives and negatives of the same thing. 'Men are not deceived; they
deceive themselves.' Witness a great American nation, in these latter
days, electing its ablest man to its highest place, and choosing between
a Fremont and a Buchanan! But let us turn quickly to the seventeenth
century again, and leave the nineteenth to its day of judgment.

Among the many astrologers dwelling in London at the time of which we
treat, William Lilly was the most famous; and his life being of great
interest to himself, he wrote an account of it for the instruction of
mankind-