sooner or later succumb to it; as for the right or wrong of spending time in such a way, there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. We may know as little of the matter as the philanthropist does of the working classes and yet admit that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Shakespeare was a poet, and poetry makes its impress by reason of an occult something that lies behind it; but the great poets are not content to trust to inspirations; they busy themselves as well with what is going on around them ; and those are well equipped indeed who have nothing to learn from carefully observing the directions in which their study tends to move.
That there was abundant public interest in Shakespeare’s time in the subject of the so-called stargazing, to which so many references are found in the poets of the period, Spencer, Chaucer, Milton, as well as the minor writers, is evident in the third scene of the 5th Act of “Lear,” where the aged king comments on the habit of the day. “We take upon us” he says, “the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies, And we wear out in a wall’d prison pacts and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon,” In Act 1, Sc. 2, however, Gloster is made to insist that these “late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” Shakespeare, never didactic, gives to Edmund the following pregnant answer:—
“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion of a man to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.”
Then conies an illustration of a Nativity which would seem to have been frequent in the poet’s time, and he closes with what, no doubt, was a sentiment that often found its way into the daily conversation of those about him:—
| “ | Edmund. | I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read the other day what should follow these eclipses. |
| Edgar. | Do you busy yourself with that? | |
| Edmund. | I promise you the effects he writes of succeed unhappily.” |
Here it is the author himself who is “sectary astronomical”
