Wise Nature fixed, that permanent doth stay,

Wheras the spheres by a diurnal sway

Of the first Mover carried are about.'

Drayton: The Man in the Moon.

299. crowding, pushing. This is still a familiar word in East

Anglia. Forby, in his Glossary of the East Anglian Dialect, says—'Crowd, v. to push, shove, or press close. To the word, in its common acceptation, number seems necessary. With us, one individual can crowd another.' To crowd a wheelbarrow means to push it. The expression 'crod in a barwe,' i. e. wheeled or pushed along in a wheelbarrow, occurs in the Paston Letters, A.D. 1477, ed. Gairdner, iii. 215.

302. A planet is said to ascend directly, when in a direct sign; but tortuously, when in a tortuous sign. The tortuous signs are those which ascend most obliquely to the horizon, viz. the signs from Capricornus to Gemini inclusive. Chaucer tells us this himself; see his Treatise on the Astrolabe, part ii. sect. 28, in vol. iii. The most 'tortuous' of these are the two middle ones, Pisces and Aries. Of these two, Aries is called the mansion of Mars, and we may therefore suppose the ascending sign to be Aries, the lord of which (Mars) is said to have fallen 'from his angle into the darkest house.' The words 'angle' and 'house' are used technically. The whole zodiacal circle was divided into twelve equal parts, or 'houses.' Of these, four (beginning from the cardinal points) were termed 'angles,' four others (next following them) 'succedents,' and the rest 'cadents.' It appears that Mars was not then situate in an 'angle,' but in his 'darkest (i. e. darker) house.' Mars had two houses, Aries and Scorpio. The latter is here meant; Aries being the ascendent sign, Scorpio was below the horizon, and beyond the western 'angle.'

Now Scorpio was 'called the house of death, and of trauaile, of harm, and of domage, of strife, of battaile, of guilefulnesse and falsnesse, and of wit'; Batman upon Bartholomè, lib. viii. c. 17. We may represent the position of Mars by the following table, where East represents the ascending sign, West the descending sign; and A., S., and C. stand for 'angle,' 'succedent,' and 'cadent house' respectively.

East.— Aries.
1. A. 		Taurus.
2. S. 		Gemini.
3. C. 		Cancer.
4. A. 		Leo.
5. S. 		Virgo.
6. C.
West.— Libra.
7. A. 		Scorpio.
8. S. 		Sagittarius.
9. C. 		Capricornus.
10. A. 		Aquarius.
11. S. 		Pisces.
12. C.