For tapers made two glaring comets rise.
St. 16. [p. 107.]
A comet was seen on the 14th of December, 1664, which lasted almost three months; and another, the 6th of April, 1665, which was visible fourteen days.—Appendix to Sherburn's Translation of Manilius, p. 241. Comets, it is well known, were in extremely bad repute among the astrologers of this period. Lilly, an unquestionable authority, treats these stars with extreme severity; hardly justifiable by his blunt averment, that "truth is truth, and a horse is a horse."[204] Dryden himself, not contented with turning these two blazing stars into farthing candles, has elsewhere, in this poem, charged them with causing the pestilence, and the great fire of London:
The utmost malice of the stars is past;
And two dire comets, which have scourged the town,
In their own plague and fire have breathed their last,
Or dimly in their sinking sockets frown.
The evil opinion which the astrologers entertained of comets, they summed up in these barbarous lines:
Octo Cometa mala hæc fulgendo per Æthera signat;
Ventus, Sterilitas, Aqua, Pestis prædominantur