as a parson does into his form of matrimony.  He converses, as angels are said to do, by intuition, and expresses himself by sighs most significantly.  He follows his visits as men do their business, and is very industrious in waiting on the ladies where his affairs lie; among which those of greatest concernment are questions and commands, purposes, and other such received forms of wit and conversation, in which he is so deeply studied that in all questions and doubts that arise he is appealed to, and very learnedly declares which was the most true and primitive way of proceeding in the purest times.  For these virtues he never fails of his summons to all balls, where he manages the country-dances with singular judgment, and is frequently an assistant at l’ombre; and these are all the uses they make of his parts, beside the sport they give themselves in laughing at him, which he takes 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