[22] The Duke of York’s behaviour is incomparable; he is their great and only comfort and support at the Queen’s house, and without his manly mind and advice neither the Queen nor Princesses would be able to bear up under their present distress.—Diaries and Correspondence, p. 20, v. 4.
It is pleasing to find in persons so entirely different in every respect a corresponding testimony to the merits of an excellent prince.
[23] To avanize is the expression used throughout the Levant to signify oppressive and forcible exactions of money from individuals, without right or claim.
CHAPTER VIII.
Lady Hester’s system of astrology—Sympathies and antipathies—People’s nijems or stars—Mesmerism explained—Lord Suffolk—Lady Hester’s own star—Letter to the Queen—Letter to Mr. Speaker Abercrombie—Messieurs Beck and Moore—Letter to Colonel Campbell—The Ides of March—Lady Hester’s reflections on the Queen’s conduct to her—Letter to Sir Edward Sugden—What peers are—Junius’s Letters—Spies employed by the first Lord Chatham—Mr. Pitt’s opinion of the Duke of Wellington—Lady Hester’s letter to his Grace, &c.
In order to render intelligible to the reader many passages which have occurred, and will occur again, in Lady Hester’s conversations, respecting what she called people’s nijems or stars, it may not be amiss to give an outline of her system of astrology, and of the supposed influence that the position of the stars in the heavens at our nativity has on our future fate and on our sympathies. I must preface what follows by observing that she had a remarkable talent for divining characters by the make of a person. This every traveller will testify who has visited her in Syria; for it was after she went to live in solitude that her penetration became so extraordinary. It was founded both on the features of the face and on the shape of the head, body, and limbs. Some indications she went by were taken from a resemblance to animals; and, wherever such indications existed, she inferred that the dispositions peculiar to those animals were to be found in the person. But, independent of all this, her doctrine was, that every creature is governed by the star under whose influence it was born.
Every star has attached to it two aërial beings, two animals, two trees, two flowers, &c.; that is, a couple of all the grand classes in creation, animal, vegetable, mineral, or etherial, whose antipathies and sympathies become congenial with the being born under the same star. She would say, “My brother Charles vomited if he ate three strawberries only: other people, born under the same star as his, may not have such an insurmountable antipathy as his was, because their star may be imperfect, whilst his was pure; but they will have it, more or less. Some persons again will have as much delight in the smell of particular flowers as cats have in the smell of valerian, when they sit and purr round it.
“The stars under which men are born may be one or more. Thus Mr. H*****, an English traveller, who came to see me, was born under four stars, all tending to beauty, but of no good in other respects. His forehead was as white as snow; his mouth” (I think she said) “was good, with a handsome small black beard; but his stars were otherwise dull: for you know the stars in the heavens are not always bright and twinkling, but sometimes heavy and clouded. It is like engravings—some of them are proofs, and those are perfect. Some persons may have a good star, but it may be cracked like a glass, and then, you know, it can’t hold water.
“The influence of stars depends, likewise, on whether they are rising, or in their zenith, or setting; and the angle at which they are must be determined by calculations, which good astrologers make very readily. But a clever man will, from his knowledge of the stars, look even at a child and say, ‘That child will have such and such diseases, such and such virtues, such and such vices;’ and this I can do: nay, what is more, I can give a description of the features of any person I have never seen, if his character is described to me, and vice versa. There is a learned man at Damascus, who possesses the same faculty in an extraordinary degree. He knew nothing of me but by report, and had never seen me: but a friend of his, having given him a description of my person and features, he noted down my virtues, vices, and qualities so exactly, that he even said in what part of my body I had got a mole, and mentioned the small mark on my shoulder, where Mr. Cline removed a tumour. There’s for you? do you believe these things, or do you not?
“A man’s destiny may be considered as a graduated scale, of which the summit is the star that presided over his birth. In the next degree comes the good angel[24] attached to that star; then the herb and the flower beneficial to his health and agreeable to his smell; then the mineral, then the tree, and such other things as contribute to his good; then the man himself: below him comes the evil spirit, then the venomous reptile or animal, the plant, and so on; things inimical to him. Where the particular tree that is beneficial or pleasurable to him flourishes naturally, or the mineral is found, there the soil and air are salubrious to that individual; and a physician who understood my doctrines, how easily could he treat his patients!—for, by merely knowing the star of a person, the simples and compounds most beneficial to him in medicine would be known also.