The later seventeenth-century herbals are marked by a return to the belief in the influence upon herbs of the heavenly bodies, but it is a travesty rather than a reflection of the ancient astrological lore. The most notable exponent of this debased lore was the infamous Nicholas Culpeper, in whom, nevertheless, the poor people in the East End seem to have had a boundless faith. It is impossible to look at the portrait of that light-hearted rogue without realising that there must have been something extraordinarily attractive about the man who was the last to set up publicly as an astrologer and herb doctor. He was the son of a clergyman who had a living somewhere in Surrey. After a brief time at Cambridge he was apprenticed to an apothecary near St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and shortly afterwards set up for himself in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, as an astrologer and herbalist. Culpeper was a staunch Roundhead and fought in at least one battle. All through the war, however, he continued his practice and he acquired a great popularity in the East End of London. In 1649 he issued his _Physical Directory_, which was a translation of the _London Dispensatory_. This drew down on him the fury of the College of Physicians, and the book was virulently attacked in a broadside issued in 1652, entitled "A farm in Spittlefields where all the knick-knacks of astrology are exposed to open sale." By this time his works were enjoying an enormous sale. No fewer than five editions of his _English Physician Enlarged_ appeared before 1698, and it was reissued even as late as 1802 and again in 1809. There is a vivid description of Culpeper in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ for May 1797:--