After noon each betook himself to what pastime he pleased. Not a few opened their shops. Others gathered round an astrologer,--a personage no longer to be seen in the cities of the west,--who had taken his stand on the _Riva degli Schiavoni_, and there, begirt with zone inscribed with cabalistic characters, and holding in his hand his wizard's staff, was setting forth, with stentorian voice, his marvellous power of healing by the combined help of the stars and his drugs. By the way, why should the profession of astrology and the cognate arts be permitted to only one class of men? In the middle ages, two classes of conjurors competed for the public patronage, but with most unequal success. The one class professed to be master of spells that were all-powerful over the elements of the material world,--the air, the earth, the ocean. The other arrogated an equal power over the invisible and spiritual world. They were skilled in a mysterious rite, which had power to open the gates of purgatory, and dismiss to a happier abode, souls there immured in woe. The pretensions of both were equally well founded: both were jugglers, and merited to have fared alike; but society, while it lavished all its credence and all its patronage upon the one, denounced the other as impostors. One colossal system of necromancy filled Europe; but the age gave the priest a monopoly; and so jealously did it guard his rights, that the conjuror who did not wear a cassock was banished or burned. We can assign no reason for the odium under which the one lay, and the repute in which the other was held, save that the art, though one, was termed witchcraft in the one case, and religion in the other. The one was compelled to shroud his mysteries in the darkness of the night, and seek the solitary cave for the performance of his spells. The arts of the other were performed in magnificent and costly cathedrals, in presence of admiring assemblies. The latter were the licensed dealers in magic; and, enjoying the public patronage, they carried their pretensions to a pitch which their less favoured brethren dared not attempt to rival. They juggled on a gigantic scale, and the more enormous the cheat, the better was it received. They rapidly grew in numbers and wealth. Their chief, the great Roman necromancer, enjoyed the state of a temporal prince, and had a whole kingdom appropriated to his use, that he might suitably support his rank and dignity as arch-conjuror.