ch I
challenge them, they have only to allege, that the play SEEMS to
insinuate it. I answer, it does not seem; which is a bare negative to
a bare affirmative; and then we are just where we were before. Fat
Falstaff was never set harder by the Prince for a reason, when he
answered, "that, if reasons grew as thick as blackberries, he would
not give one." Well, after long pumping, lest the lie should appear
quite barefaced, they have found I said, that, at king Henry's birth,
there shone a regal star; so there did at king Charles the Second's;
therefore I have made a parallel betwixt Henry III. and Charles II. A
very concluding syllogism, if I should answer it no farther.

Now, let us look upon the play; the words are in the fourth act. The
conjurer there is asking his devil, "what fortune attended his master,
the Guise, and what the king?" The familiar answers concerning the
king,--"He cannot be deposed, he may be killed; a violent fate attends
him; but, at his birth, there shone a regal star."--_Conj._ "My master
had a stronger."--_Devil._ "No, not a stronger, but more popular." Let
the whole scene, (which is one of the best in the tragedy, though
murdered in the acting) be read together, and it will be as clear as
day light, that the Devil gave an astrological account of the French
king's _horoscope_; that the regal star, then culminating, was the sun
in the tenth house, or mid-heaven; which, _caeteris paribus,_ is a
regal nativity in that art. The rest of the scene confirms what I have
said; for the Devil has taken the position of the heavens, or scheme
of the world, at the point of the sun's entrance into Aries. I dispute
not here the truth or lawfulness of that art; but it is usual with
poets, especially the Italians, to mix astrology in their poems.
Chaucer, amongst us, is frequent in it: but this revolution
particularly I have taken out of Luigi Pulci; and there is one almost
the same in Boiardo's "_Orlando Inamorato._" Now, if these poets knew,
that a star were to appear at our king's birth, they were better
prophets than Nostradamus, who has told us nothing of it. Yet this
they say "is treason with a witness," and one of the crimes for which
they condemned me to be hanged, drawn and quartered. I find they do
not believe me to be one of their party at the bottom, by their
charitable wishes to me; and am proud enough to think, I have done
them some little mischief, because they are so desirous to be rid of
me. Bu