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.  But if Jack Ketch must needs have the handling of us poets, let him begin first where he may take the deepest say[41]; let me be hanged, but in my turn; for I am sure I am neither the fattest scribbler, nor the worst; I’ll be judged by their own party.  But, for all our comforts, the days of hanging are a little out of date; and I hope there will be no more treason with a witness or witnesses; for now there is no more to be got by swearing, and the market is overstocked besides.

But are you in earnest when you say, I have made Henry III. “fearful, weak, bloody, perfidious, hypocritical, and fawning, in the play?” I am sure an unbiassed reader will find a more favourable image of him in the tragedy, whatever he was out of it.  You would not have told a lie so shameless, but that you were resolved to second it with a worse—­that I made a parallel of that prince.  And now it comes to my turn, pray let me ask you,—­why you spend three pages and a half in heaping up all the villainies, true or false, which you can rake together, to blast his memory?  Why is all this pains taken to expose the person of king Henry III.?  Are you leaguers, or covenanters, or associators?