Our immortal poet puts into the mouth of Edmund in _King Lear_:--"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treacherous, 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 libertine to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father married my mother under the Dragon's tail; and my nativity was under _Ursa major_; so that it follows I am rough lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my birth." Voltaire writes thus:--"This error is ancient, and that is enough. The Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, the Jews could predict, and therefore we can predict now. If no more predictions are made it is not the fault of the art. So said the alchemists of the philosopher's stone. If you do not find to-day it is because you are not clever enough; but it is certain that it is in the clavicle of Solomon, and on that certainty more than two hundred families in Germany and France have been ruined. Do you wonder either that so many men, otherwise much exalted above the vulgar, such as princes or popes, who knew their interests so well, should be so ridiculously seduced by this impertinence of astrology. They were very proud and very ignorant. There were no stars but for them; the rest of the universe was _canaille_, for whom the stars did not trouble themselves. I have not the honour of being a prince. Nevertheless, the celebrated Count of Boulainvilliers and an Italian, called Colonne, who had great reputation in Paris, both predicted to me that I should infallibly die at the age of thirty-two. I have had the malice already to deceive them by thirty years, for which I humbly beg their pardon." The method by which these predictions were arrived at consisted in making the different stars and planets responsible for different parts of the body, different properties, and different events, and making up stories from the association of ideas thus obtained, which of course admitted of the greatest degree of latitude. The principles are explained by Manilius in his great poem entitled _The Astronomicals_, written two thousand years ago. According to him the sun presided over the head, the moon over the right arm, Venus over the left, Jupiter over the stomach, Mars the parts below, Mercury over the right leg, and Saturn over the left.