That the movements of the stars should affect human life is not easy to disprove even now, to any one who is determined to maintain the possibility of it; but under the training of modern science scarcely any one retains such a belief.  Of the influence formerly attributed to the planets, traces survive in such epithets as mercurial, jovial, saturnine.  Comets appearing in the sky caused widespread alarm, and any disasters that followed close were confidently connected with them.  The most learned scientists observed the stars and cast horoscopes:  Cardan, for instance, published a collection of the horoscopes of great men.  The Church looked askance on astrology, suspecting it of connexion with forbidden arts; but it could not check the observance of lucky days and the warnings of the heavens.  Even a Pope himself, Julius II, deferred his coronation until the stars were in a fortunate conjunction.

Every university student should be familiar with the story of Anthony Dalaber, undergraduate of St. Alban’s Hall in Oxford, which Froude introduced into his History of England from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; it is the most vivid picture we have of university life in the early sixteenth century.  Dalaber was one of a company of young men who were reading Lutheran books at Oxford.  Wolsey, wishing to check this, had sent down orders in February 1528 to arrest a certain Master Garret, who was abetting them in the dissemination of heresy.  The Vice-Chancellor, who was the Rector of Lincoln, seized Dalaber and put him in the stocks, but was too late for Garret, who had made off into Dorsetshire.  He took counsel with the Warden of New College and with the Dean of Wolsey’s new foundation, Cardinal College; and at length, as they could find out nothing, being ‘in extreme pensiveness’, they determined to consult an astrologer.  They knew they were doing wrong.  Such inquiries were forbidden by the law of the Church, and they were afraid; but they were more afraid of Wolsey.  The man of science drew a figure upon the floor of his secret chamber, and made his calculations; at the end he reported that the fugitive was fled in a tawny coat to the South-east.  The trembling officials hastily dispatched messengers to have the ports watched in Kent and Sussex, hoping that their transgression might at least be justified by success.  They were successful:  Master Garret was caught—­trying to take ship at Bristol.  It would need awesome circumstances indeed to send a modern Vice-Chancellor through the night to inquire of an astrologer.

In the realm of medicine, too, magic and the supernatural had great weight, and claimed a measure of success which is not unintelligible in these days, when the value of the will as an ally in healing is being understood.  Erasmus, suffering from the stone, was presented by a Hungarian physician with an astrological mug, shaped like a lion, which was to cure his trouble.  He used it and felt better, but was not sure how much