ability of signing his name to a list of malefactors.

The mysterious and enigmatical writers who have related these circumstances of Nero, proceed in the most strange and inconsistent manner to relate a pretended change of conduct. He is said to have become debauched and profligate; effeminate, cruel, infamous, and lascivious, incurring the public hatred: the murderer of his mother, his tutor, and his friends; and at length dying miserably in the gardens of Phaon. The whole of these Apocryphal stories are a collection of emblems, referring to astronomy, and identifying Nero with the sign Virgo.

Virgo once filled in the Zodiac the place which is now occupied by Libra. It was

therefore the first of the descending signs. The ancients, as the arch Volney' has demonstrated, considered the six last signs as the reign of Ahriman, winter, and desolation and were accustomed to express their dread of the approaching dreariness, by every appellation of contempt and detestation. The change of seasons is imperceptible; and the hopes in which they indulged, that the Sun, though he had begun to descend, would still continue his auspicious influences, prompted them to consider the commencement of his decline with complacency. Hence they represented in their histories the sign Virgo, as giving fair promises, which were never fulfilled; as a tree full of branches, but without fruit as holding ears of corn in her hand to signify that the joy of harvest was past, though the

' Vide Volney's Ruins of Empires.

harvest weather was not entirely gone by. When all these fair promises were disappointed, when storms and rain, and the melancholy changes of the season actually approached; they spoke of this sign in the most contemptuous language, as the murderess of a mother, and the enemy of mankind. The mysterious allusions of this part of the Roman history are thus fully developed. As the sign Virgo began with fine weather, and ended with storms, so Nero is typically described as commencing his career in virtue, and closing it in vice.

I could confirm this interpretation by proving that Agrippina, Britannicus, Seneca, Lucan, and others, were Ammonian names, descriptive of the stars and constellations near Virgo: but I must proceed.

I forgot to observe, that Nero is derived

from the old word to divide; the Zodiac

in the time of Nero being divided by Virgo.

VII. Galba-Asher-Libra.

THE name Galba signifies in a secondary sense, the balance. It is derived from aba, a shaver, one who makes smooth, or permits no inequality. Galba was so much esteemed for his love of justice, and weighing all things with impartiality as in a balance, that according to the Roman historians, this virtue is said to have been the chief cause of his elevation to the empire.

"In the account of the Indian sphere," says Sir William Drummond, "under the sign Libra, I read as follows, Homo in tabernâ institoriâ in foro, manu tenens stá