“perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide, Hereafter when they come to model heaven, And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive, To save appearances; how gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”[73] [73] _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 77-84. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Such inconsistencies are not found in Dante’s work, and nothing could have been further from his thoughts than to imagine the Creator mocking at man’s mistakes and ignorance. Like the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, he considered man’s desire for knowledge as one of his highest attributes, and believed that it had been given to him in order to be satisfied. But before we examine Dante’s writings, it will be interesting to form an idea of the spirit in which astronomy was generally regarded by his fellow-countrymen, and what were his opportunities of studying it. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in or about the year 1265, and died in 1321. There can be no doubt that the part of star-lore which appealed most to the general public in Italy at this time, educated and ignorant alike, was the art of the astrologers. The movements of the heavenly bodies were regarded not merely as omens, but as the actual instruments by which every event on Earth was brought to pass. Every class of plants, every race of animals, was thought to be under the protection of some planet or constellation; so if it was a bad year for certain fruits, or if an epidemic broke out among the cattle, this was because the guardian planet was unfavourably placed, or an evil planet was in the protecting constellation. Floods and drought, prosperity and death, properties of minerals such as the lodestone’s attraction for iron or the emerald’s alleged power of blinding serpents, the instincts of animals and the impulses of men, all were subject to the influences of the stars; and naturally the men who understood and interpreted their movements were held in great repute. Some of them were unscrupulous quacks, like the one-eyed prophet of Brescia, mentioned by the gossiping friar Salimbene.[74] He “called himself an astrologer and diviner,” and received daily “ten great pennies of silver, and nightly three great Genoese candles of the purest wax” from a political party in Modena, as a recompense for advising them how to act. On one occasion he prophesied a victory for them, but he had little faith in his own words, for being threatened with violence if his prophecy should fail, he “carried off all that he had gained and went his way without saluting his hosts.” “Then,” adds the friar, “the men of Sassuolo began to mock them, as men who sacrifice to devils and not to God, as it is written in Deuteronomy.”