Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/446

 the same day in the church of St. Mary, Lambeth. His friend Lilly reports that on the previous Sunday Forman's wife had asked him whether he or she should die first. He answered that she would bury him on the following Thursday. On the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday Forman was in his usual health, and his wife twitted him with the falseness of his prophecy. But on Thursday after dinner he took a boat at Southwark to cross the Thames to Puddle Dock, and having rowed into mid stream fell down dead. A storm arose immediately after his death. With this curious story may be compared the account of the death of Sir [q. v.], which his wife Eleanor foretold.

Forman seems to have married twice. Weldon describes one of his wives as 'a very pretty wench' who was noted for her infidelity. At Lambeth on 29 July 1599, when he was forty-seven, he married his first wife, Anne Baker, a niece on her mother's side of Sir Edward Moninges, and a member of a Canterbury family. This lady was only seventeen at the date of the marriage, and the union does not seem to have been a happy one. The name of Forman's second wife, who survived him, was Jane, and she had a sister, Susan Browne of London. She was her husband's executrix, and a letter from her to a friend referring to her troubles since her husband's death, and dated from Lambeth Marsh 26 Feb. 1611-1612, is in Ashmole MS. 240, f. 107. By his first wife Forman had a son Clement. He left 1,200l. in money and a large illegitimate family.

The sole work which Forman is known to have printed in his lifetime is 'The Grounds of the Longitude, with an admonition to all those that are incredulous and believe not the trueth of the same. Written by Simon Forman, student in astronomie and philosophy,' London, 1591, by Thomas Dawson. No copy is in the British Museum. One is in the Ashmolean collection at the Bodleian. Forman left a mass of manuscripts to Richard Napier, 'who had formerly been his scholar.' Napier bequeathed them to Sir Richard Napier his nephew, whose son Thomas gave them to [q. v.] They are now among the Ashmolean MSS. at the Bodleian. The manuscripts, which Wood remarks Forman did not live to methodise, include much autobiographical material. One of the most interesting features is a folio manuscript pamphlet entitled 'The Bocke of Plaies and notes thereof per Formans for common pollicie.' The earliest extant accounts are here supplied of the performances of Shakespeare's Macbeth' (at the Globe Theatre on Saturday, 20 April 1610), of the 'Winter's Tale' (at the Globe on Wednesday, 15 May 1611), and of 'Cymbeline.' A representation of a play, acted 30 April 1611, by another dramatist on the subject of Richard II is also described. The passages relating to Shakespeare were first printed in J. P. Collier's 'New Particulars,' 1836, pp. 6-26; facsimiles are given in Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's 'Folio Shakespeare' (1853-65). A diary from 1564 to 1602, with an account of Forman's early life (from Ashmole MS. 208), was printed by Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1843 for the Camden Society, but the astrologer's frank confessions of his immoral habits led the committee to cancel the publication after a few sheets had passed through the press. Sixteen copies were alone struck off. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps added to this collection some genealogical notes by Forman, and issued it privately in an edition of 105 copies in 1849. The transcript is not always intelligible, but the difficulty of transcribing Forman's crabbed handwriting is very great. A diary for 1607 (Ashmole MS. 802, f. 152) was examined by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps and deemed unfit for publication. Bliss has printed in his notes to Wood's 'Athenss Oxon.' ii. 101-2, an (Argumente between Forman and Deathe in his Sicknes 1585, Sept. the 4th,' in verse from Ashmole MS. 208, f. 13 b. Six books of medical practice, dated between March 1596 and December 1600, give the names of Forman's patients and their diseases. Chemical and medical collections, astrological papers, alchemical notes, verses on miscellaneous topics, and Forman's letters to Napier, fill a large number of the remaining manuscript volumes. There are also separate treatises on the plague, on the art of geomancy, on prayer, on the astrological judgments of diseases, on the creation of the world, the restoration of the Jews, and the life of Merlin, besides a poem on antichrist, prayers in Latin and English verse, and the astrologer's accounts of his dreams. In the printed diary Forman mentions that in 1600 he wrote out the two books of 'De Arte Memoratus' by Appolonius Niger, and copied also the four books of Stegonnographia and divers other books (p. 30). There are, moreover, manuscript verses on his troubles with the doctors in the Plymouth Library, and these were printed by Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in his privately printed account of that library in 1853. Sir S. E. Brydges printed in 'Censuria Literaria,' iv. 410, a short account by Forman 'of Lucifer's creation and of the world's creation,' from a manuscript in St. John's College, Oxford.

Forman states that his portrait was painted in 1600, when he was arrayed in elaborate