to attend; nay, several men of sense and knowledge honoured this rendezvous.  Congreve’s picture of a man like Foresight, the dupe of astrology and its sister arts, was then common in society.  But the astrologers of the 17th century did not confine themselves to the stars.  There was no province of fraud which they did not practise; they were scandalous as panders, and as quacks sold potions for the most unworthy purposes.  For such reasons the common people detested the astrologers of the great as cordially as they did the more vulgar witches of their own sphere.

Dr. Lamb, patronised by the Duke of Buckingham, who, like other overgrown favourites, was inclined to cherish astrology, was in 1640 pulled to pieces in the city of London by the enraged populace, and his maid-servant, thirteen years afterwards, hanged as a witch at Salisbury.  In the villanous transaction of the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, in King James’s time, much mention was made of the art and skill of Dr. Forman, another professor of the same sort with Lamb, who was consulted by the Countess of Essex on the best mode of conducting her guilty intrigue with the Earl of Somerset.  He was dead before the affair broke out, which might otherwise have cost him the gibbet, as it did all others concerned, with the exception only of the principal parties, the atrocious authors of the crime.  When the cause was tried, some little puppets were produced in court, which were viewed by one party with horror, as representing the most horrid spells.  It was even said that the devil was about to pull down the court-house on their being discovered.  Others of the audience only saw in them the baby figures on which the dressmakers then, as now, were accustomed to expose new fashions.

The erection of the Royal Society, dedicated to far different purposes than the pursuits of astrology, had a natural operation in bringing the latter into discredit; and although the credulity of the ignorant and uninformed continued to support some pretenders to that science, the name of Philomath, assumed by these persons and their clients, began to sink under ridicule and contempt.  When Sir Richard Steele set up the paper called the Guardian, he chose, under the title of Nestor Ironside, to assume the character of an astrologer, and issued predictions accordingly, one of which, announcing the death of a person called Partridge, once a shoemaker, but at the time the conductor of an Astrological Almanack, led to a controversy, which was supported with great humour by Swift and other wags.  I believe you will find that this, with Swift’s Elegy on the same person, is one of the last occasions in which astrology has afforded even a jest to the good people of England.