aspect was not strong enough to be of service. The lad refuses to be moved; the father thereupon sees the inevitable and concludes by saying:—“Then here I take my leave of thee fair son, born to eclipse thy life this afternoon; come, side by side together,” The astro-logical crisis occurs in the seventh scene,
Julia, in Act 2, Sc. 7 of the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” says that “truer stars did govern Proteus’ breath”, and, in the “Merry Wives” is recorded, in reply to an Arien outburst on the part of Pym, Pistol’s conviction that he is “the very Mars of malcontents.” Mars, it will be remembered, is the ruler of the Zodiacal sign of Aries.
In the third scene of the opening Act of “Much Ado” we have Don John saying:—
“I wonder that thou, being (as thou say’st thou
art) born under Saturn, goest about to apply a
moral medicine to a mortifying mischief,”
Don John, himself an ill-aspected Saturn man, naturally objected to his ruling planet being accused of harbouring good intentions, even though of fruitless kind. To recur, however, to Mars, there is in “All's Well” some entertaining treatment, Helena showing herself to be quite a skilled practitioner, In Act 1, Se. 1, she says;—“It were all one that I should love a bright particular star and think to wed it”, the fuller meaning appearing later when she speaks of we “the poorer born, whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes”, while at the close of the scene, there is the following:—
| “ | Hel. | Monsieur Parolles, you were bora under a charitable star. |
| Par. | Under Mars I. | |
| Hel. | I especially think under Mars. | |
| Par. | Why under Mars? | |
| Hel. | The wars have so kept you under that you must needs be born nuder Mars. | |
| Par. | When he was predominant? | |
| Hel. | When he was retrograde, I think, rather,” |
This entire Act being one of its author’s most attractive Court studies, which in “Hamlet” came to such perfection, Helena’s charitable construction of Mars is more readily accepted He is here found in full knowledge of the importance of the retrogression of a planet, which might be suggested as having been in his mind when he causes the King in “Hamlet” to
