Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/113

 SYDENHAM. 95 there wanted not persons wicked enough to encou- rage : people were seen running about to fortune- tellers, cunning men, and astrologers, to have their nativities cast, and to know their fortunes, i This folly made the town swarm with wicked pretenders to magic and the black art ; it be- came common for them to have signs with inscrip- tions, — Here liveth an astrologer — Friar Bacon's head — Mother Shipton — a Merlin, or the like; in short, the usual signs of these impostors were to be seen in almost every street. One great mis- chief was, if these deluders were asked if there would be a plague, they all agreed to answer, yes ; for that maintained their trade : had the people not been kept in a fright, the wizards would ! have been rendered useless, and their craft at an end ; but they always talked of the influences of j stars and conjunctions of planets, which must, ! necessarily, bring sickness, distempers, and the plague. Saturn and Jupiter had been observed in conjunction, in Sagittarius, on the 10th of Oc- tober ; and Saturn and Mars also, in the same sign, on the 12th of November! There was no remedy for this horrid delusion, till the plague put an end to it, by clearing the town of most of these mock calculators. " Before this happened, many of the people, given up to prophecies, dreams, and old wives' j tales, became so enthusiastically bold as to run i about the streets with their oral predictions, pre- i tending that they were sent to preach to the city ; one, like Jonah at Nineveh, cried in the streets, — ' Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed ; *