Two others were Walter Warner, who is said to have suggested to Harvey the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Robert Hues, famed for his “Treatise on the Globes.” These, with Hariot, were the earl’s constant companions; and at a period when science seemed connected with necromancy, the world distinguished the earl and his three friends as “Henry the Wizard, and his three Magi.” We may regret that no Symposia have come down to us from this learned society in the Tower, which we may consider as the first philosophical society in our country. All these persons, eminent in their day, appear to have written in their various departments, and were inventors in science; yet few of their works have passed through the press. This circumstance is a curious evidence in our literary history, that in that day the studious composed their works without any view to their publicity; the difficulty of obtaining a publisher for any work of science might also have conduced to confine their discoveries to their private circle. Some of these learned men probably were uncouth writers; Dee never could end a sentence in his rambling, confused style. Many of these works, scattered in their forlorn state of manuscript, often fell into hands who appropriated them to their own purpose. Even Hariot’s treatise, which furnished Descartes with a new idea of the science, was a posthumous publication by his friend Warner, merely to secure a continuance of the pension which had been granted to him by the Earl of Northumberland.
These philosophers appear to have advanced far intotheir inquiries, for they were branded by atheism or deism. What therefore has reached us coming from ignorant or prejudiced reporters will not satisfy our curiosity. Of Hariot, Wood tells that “he always undervalued the old story of the creation of the world, and could never believe the trite positionex nihilo nihil fit. He made aphilosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament, so that consequently the New would have no foundation. He was a deist, and his doctrine he did impart to the Earl of Northumberland and to Sir Walter Rawleigh, when he was compiling his ‘History of the World.’ He would controvert the matter with eminent divines, who therefore having no good opinion of him, did look on the matter of his death as a judgment for nullifying the Scriptures.” Hariot died of a cancer on his lip.
From such accounts we can derive no knowledge of thephilosophical theologyof Hariot. He was the philosopher, however, who went to Virginia with the design of establishing a people of peace, with the Bible in his hand. He taught those children of nature its pure doctrines till they began to idolise the book itself, embracing it, kneeling to it, and rubbing their bodies with it. This new Manco Capac checked this innocent idolatry, but probably found some difficulty in making them rightly comprehend that the Bible was but a book like any other, made by many hands; but that the spiritual doctrine contained in it was a thing not to be touched nor seen, but to be obeyed. Such a philosopher, could he have remained among these Indians, would have become the great legislator of a tribe of primitive Christians; and as he actually contrived to construct an alphabet for them, this seems to have been his intention.
The doctrines of Hariot, which Wood has reprobated, certainly were not infused into the pages of Rawleigh; his divinity is never sceptical; his researches only lead to speculations purely ethical and political—what men have done, and what men do.10
Such were the men of science, daily guests in the Tower during the imprisonment of Rawleigh; and when he had constructed his laboratory to pursue his chemical experiments, he must have multiplied their wonders. With one he had been intimately connected early in life; Hariot had been his mathematical tutor, was domesticated in his house, and became his confidential agent in the expedition to Virginia. Rawleigh had earnestly recommended his friend to the Earl of Northumberland, and Sion House in consequence became for Hariot a home and an observatory.
The scholastic Dr. Burhill is supposed to have been one among the learned friends whose assistance in his Hebraic researches Rawleigh acknowledges. It was such a student that might have led Rawleigh into his singular discussion on the site of paradise. One great name has claimed the tracings of his hand in the “History of the World.” Ben Jonson has positively told that he wrote a piece on the Punic wars, which Rawleigh “altered and set in his book.” The verses prefixed to the “Mind of the Frontispiece” are Jonson’s. There was an intimacy between Jonson and Rawleigh which appears to have been interrupted, and this may possibly have given occasion to the remarkable sharp stricture from Jonson, in his conversation with Drummond, that “Rawleigh esteemed more fame than conscience; the best wits in England were employed in making his ‘History of the World.’”
Rawleigh, in his vast and recondite collection of criticism and chronology, would enrich his volume with the stores accumulated from the sources of brother-minds; it is even said that he submitted his composition to Serjeant Hoskyns, that universal Aristarchus of that day, at whose feet, to use the style of honest Anthony, all poets threw their verses;11but the most material characteristic of his work Rawleigh could borrow from no one—the tone and elevation of his genius.
But if the “History of the World” instructed his contemporaries, there was a greater history in his mind, which had secured the universal acceptance of posterity—the history of his own times. But the age of Elizabeth, in manuscript, might be an act of treason in the court of James the First, in the eyes of his redoubted rival Cecil; he who did not wholly escape from malicious applications in writing the history of the world that had passed away, eluded the fatal struggle with contemporary passions. He has himself acquainted us of this loss to our domestic political history: “It will be said by many that I might have been more pleasing to the reader if I had written the story of mine own times, having been permitted to draw water as near the well-head as another. To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. There is no mistress or guide that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries. He that goeth after her too far off, loseth her sight and loseth himself; and he that walks after her at a middle distance, I know not whether I should call that kind of course, temper or baseness.”12
The miscellaneous writings of Rawleigh are so numerous and so various, that Oldys has classed them under the heads, poetical, epistolary, military, maritime, geographical, political, philosophical, and historical.13
Of a character so exalted and a genius so varied, how has it happened that Gibbon, who had once intended to compose the wondrous tale of his life, has pronounced his character to be “ambiguous;” and that Hume has described it as “a great, but ill-regulated mind?”14
The story of Rawleigh is a moral phenomenon; but what is there that moves in the sphere of humanity, of which, when we discover the principle of action, we cannot calculate even the most eccentric movements? Rawleigh from the first was to be the architect of his own fortunes; this was a calamity with him, for a perpetual impulse was communicated to the versatility and the boundless capacity of a genius which seemed universal. Soldier and sailor, sage and statesman, he could not escape from the common fate of becoming the creature of circumstance. What vicissitudes! what moral revelations! How he disdained his enviers! His towering ambition paused not in its altitude; he reached its apex, and having accomplished everything, he missed all! He whose life is a life of adventure, who is now the daring child of fortune, and falls to be the miserable heir of misfortune, though glory sometimes disguises his recklessness, is doomed to be often humiliated as well as haughty.
The favourite of his sovereign, thrown amid the contending suitors of a female Court, we have found creepingin crooked politics, and intriguing in dark labyrinths. Rawleigh met his evil genius in Cecil; he saw his solitary hope vanish with Prince Henry. Awakening his last energies with the juvenile passion of his early days, he pledged his life on a new adventure—it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy, for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its lustre was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary passions.
There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did not embrace. What science was that unwearying mind not busied in? What arts of hoar antiquity did he not love to seek? What sense of the beautiful ever passed transiently over his spirit? His books and his pictures ever accompanied him in his voyages. Even in the short hour before his last morning, is he not still before us, while his midnight pen traces his mortuary verse, perpetuating the emotions of the sage, and of the hero who could not fear death.15
Such is the psychological history of a genius of the first order of minds, whom posterity hails among the founders of our literature.
1Lodge’s “Illustrations of British History,” iii. 67.2Sidney Letters, ii. 45.3When Rawleigh was himself in the place where he had put Essex—on the scaffold, he solemnly declared that “he had no hand in his blood, and was none of them that procured his death.” How are we to reconcile this declaration with the extraordinary letter which first appeared in Murdin’s Collection, and which Hume asserts “contains the strongest proofs to the contrary?”—Mr. Lodge understands the advice of Rawleigh in the very worst sense; Mr. Tytler, with ingenuity, suggests that Cecil, with “a prospective wariness, which—not satisfied with deceiving his contemporaries—providedblinds for posterity,” procured Rawleigh to address this letter to him; and, in a word, that, in composing this energetic epistle, he was not so much the writer as the agent in the plot. I am more disposed to believe that when Rawleigh wrote so remarkable a letter, he was fully aware of its import, and looked forwards to the result.4The extraordinary means of the duplicity of this wily minister are stated by Mr.Tytlerin the Appendix to his “Life of Rawleigh.”5AsRawleigh, like all his contemporaries, including Shakspeare, wrote his name diversely, so that we are at a loss to pronounce it, this spontaneous sally of the Scottish monarch reveals its real pronunciation; which is also confirmed by a sort of epigram of that day.6The secret history of this state-riddle—the conspiracy of Cobham, a disappointed courtier—as Mr. Lodge observes, might fill a moderate volume of speculations on its darker parts. All historians agree that it must remain insolvable, and “hopelessly obscure.” It is, however, opened with great vigour and novelty of research by Mr.Tytlerin the Appendix to his biography of Rawleigh. But he passes over too slightly the conversation and the offer of the “eight thousand crowns;” and “the pension,” of which Rawleigh said—“he would tell him more when he saw the money.” It is quite evident that Rawleigh had been tampered with by the silly Cobham, whose ricketty brains had been concocting a crude, fantastic plot, which was hardly the initial of one. But Rawleigh had listened; he had not positively refused his participation, neither had he yielded his consent. When “the eight thousand crowns” had safely arrived, where were they to go? Rawleigh declared that “when he saw the money, he would be ready to talk more on the subject.” Mr. Tytler, like Sir Walter, is pleased to consider that the whole affair was “one of Lord Cobham’s idle conceits.”7This incident in the life of Rawleigh is told in the “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. I have been enabled to give the secret history of this Sir Lewis Stukeley, who having first despoiled, then betrayed his great kinsman. That history offers one of the most striking instances of moral retribution.8The explanatory stanzas prefixed to this “Mind,” though unsubscribed by the name of the writer, were composed by Jonson, for they appear in his works.9Rawleigh notices a singular instinct in the birds in these new regions, which built their nests on the twigs of trees, pendent over the waters, rather than in the branches, to save their young from the attacks of the monkeys. In such relations he is full and particular. He collects the marvellous accounts of theFicus indica—the Banian, or sacred tree of the Brahmins; we nowhere find such a lively picture of that singular curiosity of nature, the self-planting tree, here minutely described.10The authors of the “General Dictionary” censure Wood for his unauthenticated assertions; and they infer that, as he was thus evidently erroneous in his notion of Rawleigh’s history, he may have been equally so in his idea of the philosophical theology of Hariot. Wood, however, could have alleged his authority, though a very indifferent one. We have recently discovered that Wood here was only transcribing the crude hearsays of his friend Aubrey; and, in these matters, the Oxford antiquary, and the “magotie-headed” gossiper, as Wood afterwards found him to be, were equally intelligent.11Hoskyns wrote many poems. A manuscript volume of his poems, fairly written we may presume for the press, and “bigger than all Donne’s works,” was “lent by his son Sir Benedict,” A. Wood tells us, “who was a man that ran with the usurping Parliament, to a certain person, in 1653, but he could never retrieve it.” We are left in the dark to know whether we have lost a great poet or only a loyalist; whether the “certain person” was a parliamentaryenragé, or only utterly reckless of a collection of poems “bigger than Dr. Donne’s!” One poem of this great critic has come down to us, of which there is more than one manuscript in the Museum, and one in the Ashmolean,—“A Vision,” addressed to the king during his confinement, in which he introduces his mother, and his wife, and his child. By the frequency of these copies we find how much temporary passion gave an interest to very indifferent writings. It is printed by Dr. Bliss in the “Athenæ Oxonienses.”12Preface to the “History of the World.”13The name of Rawleigh proved too attractive for the booksellers to escape their grasp; they have forged his name on various occasions, and they have done worse; for they have unquestionably adulterated his genuine works by admitting writings which he never could have written. Rawleigh composed some “Instructions to his Son and to Posterity.” The publisher of his “Remains” probably considered that “The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father” must be equally acceptable. Sir Walter had no aged father to address; and if he had, he would not have written such a mean piece of puritanic insolence. I suspect that “The Advice” was nothing but a parody on “The Instructions” by some very witless scribbler.14Hume was bitterly attacked in the “Biographia Britannica” by a Dr. Philip Nicoll, one of the writers calling himself one of the proprietors, for his account of the conduct of Rawleigh—art. “Ralegh,” note (cc). The spirit of nationality was rife in 1760, when we find that a cruel apology is inflicted on Hume as “a foreigner! for this writer may be allowed the privilege of that plea, as being born and bred, and constantly living among a people, and under a constitution, of a very different nature, genius, and temper from the English!” I cannot believe that Hume, to remove the odium of Rawleigh’s death from the Scottish monarch, purposely depreciated the hero; but probably looking hastily into the account of Guiana, stuffed with the monstrous tales of a lying Spaniard, and considering the whole to be a gross artifice of the great navigator for an interested purpose, he gave way to his impressions.15The Dean of Westminster was astonished at Rawleigh’s cheerfulness on the day of his execution, who “made no more of his death than if he had been to take a journey.” The divine was fearful that this contempt of death might arise from “a senselessness of his own state,” but the hero satisfied the dean that he died “very Christianly.” Yet the gossip of Aubrey tells, that “his cousin Whitney said, and I think it is printed, that he spake not one word of Christ, but of the great and incomprehensible God with much zeal and adoration, so that he concluded he was an a-Christ, not an a-theist.” In this manner great men were then judged whenever they “ventured at discourse which was unpleasant to the churchmen,” as this confused recorder of curious matters has sent down to us. This indicates that Socinian principles were appearing.
1Lodge’s “Illustrations of British History,” iii. 67.
2Sidney Letters, ii. 45.
3When Rawleigh was himself in the place where he had put Essex—on the scaffold, he solemnly declared that “he had no hand in his blood, and was none of them that procured his death.” How are we to reconcile this declaration with the extraordinary letter which first appeared in Murdin’s Collection, and which Hume asserts “contains the strongest proofs to the contrary?”—Mr. Lodge understands the advice of Rawleigh in the very worst sense; Mr. Tytler, with ingenuity, suggests that Cecil, with “a prospective wariness, which—not satisfied with deceiving his contemporaries—providedblinds for posterity,” procured Rawleigh to address this letter to him; and, in a word, that, in composing this energetic epistle, he was not so much the writer as the agent in the plot. I am more disposed to believe that when Rawleigh wrote so remarkable a letter, he was fully aware of its import, and looked forwards to the result.
4The extraordinary means of the duplicity of this wily minister are stated by Mr.Tytlerin the Appendix to his “Life of Rawleigh.”
5AsRawleigh, like all his contemporaries, including Shakspeare, wrote his name diversely, so that we are at a loss to pronounce it, this spontaneous sally of the Scottish monarch reveals its real pronunciation; which is also confirmed by a sort of epigram of that day.
6The secret history of this state-riddle—the conspiracy of Cobham, a disappointed courtier—as Mr. Lodge observes, might fill a moderate volume of speculations on its darker parts. All historians agree that it must remain insolvable, and “hopelessly obscure.” It is, however, opened with great vigour and novelty of research by Mr.Tytlerin the Appendix to his biography of Rawleigh. But he passes over too slightly the conversation and the offer of the “eight thousand crowns;” and “the pension,” of which Rawleigh said—“he would tell him more when he saw the money.” It is quite evident that Rawleigh had been tampered with by the silly Cobham, whose ricketty brains had been concocting a crude, fantastic plot, which was hardly the initial of one. But Rawleigh had listened; he had not positively refused his participation, neither had he yielded his consent. When “the eight thousand crowns” had safely arrived, where were they to go? Rawleigh declared that “when he saw the money, he would be ready to talk more on the subject.” Mr. Tytler, like Sir Walter, is pleased to consider that the whole affair was “one of Lord Cobham’s idle conceits.”
7This incident in the life of Rawleigh is told in the “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. I have been enabled to give the secret history of this Sir Lewis Stukeley, who having first despoiled, then betrayed his great kinsman. That history offers one of the most striking instances of moral retribution.
8The explanatory stanzas prefixed to this “Mind,” though unsubscribed by the name of the writer, were composed by Jonson, for they appear in his works.
9Rawleigh notices a singular instinct in the birds in these new regions, which built their nests on the twigs of trees, pendent over the waters, rather than in the branches, to save their young from the attacks of the monkeys. In such relations he is full and particular. He collects the marvellous accounts of theFicus indica—the Banian, or sacred tree of the Brahmins; we nowhere find such a lively picture of that singular curiosity of nature, the self-planting tree, here minutely described.
10The authors of the “General Dictionary” censure Wood for his unauthenticated assertions; and they infer that, as he was thus evidently erroneous in his notion of Rawleigh’s history, he may have been equally so in his idea of the philosophical theology of Hariot. Wood, however, could have alleged his authority, though a very indifferent one. We have recently discovered that Wood here was only transcribing the crude hearsays of his friend Aubrey; and, in these matters, the Oxford antiquary, and the “magotie-headed” gossiper, as Wood afterwards found him to be, were equally intelligent.
11Hoskyns wrote many poems. A manuscript volume of his poems, fairly written we may presume for the press, and “bigger than all Donne’s works,” was “lent by his son Sir Benedict,” A. Wood tells us, “who was a man that ran with the usurping Parliament, to a certain person, in 1653, but he could never retrieve it.” We are left in the dark to know whether we have lost a great poet or only a loyalist; whether the “certain person” was a parliamentaryenragé, or only utterly reckless of a collection of poems “bigger than Dr. Donne’s!” One poem of this great critic has come down to us, of which there is more than one manuscript in the Museum, and one in the Ashmolean,—“A Vision,” addressed to the king during his confinement, in which he introduces his mother, and his wife, and his child. By the frequency of these copies we find how much temporary passion gave an interest to very indifferent writings. It is printed by Dr. Bliss in the “Athenæ Oxonienses.”
12Preface to the “History of the World.”
13The name of Rawleigh proved too attractive for the booksellers to escape their grasp; they have forged his name on various occasions, and they have done worse; for they have unquestionably adulterated his genuine works by admitting writings which he never could have written. Rawleigh composed some “Instructions to his Son and to Posterity.” The publisher of his “Remains” probably considered that “The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father” must be equally acceptable. Sir Walter had no aged father to address; and if he had, he would not have written such a mean piece of puritanic insolence. I suspect that “The Advice” was nothing but a parody on “The Instructions” by some very witless scribbler.
14Hume was bitterly attacked in the “Biographia Britannica” by a Dr. Philip Nicoll, one of the writers calling himself one of the proprietors, for his account of the conduct of Rawleigh—art. “Ralegh,” note (cc). The spirit of nationality was rife in 1760, when we find that a cruel apology is inflicted on Hume as “a foreigner! for this writer may be allowed the privilege of that plea, as being born and bred, and constantly living among a people, and under a constitution, of a very different nature, genius, and temper from the English!” I cannot believe that Hume, to remove the odium of Rawleigh’s death from the Scottish monarch, purposely depreciated the hero; but probably looking hastily into the account of Guiana, stuffed with the monstrous tales of a lying Spaniard, and considering the whole to be a gross artifice of the great navigator for an interested purpose, he gave way to his impressions.
15The Dean of Westminster was astonished at Rawleigh’s cheerfulness on the day of his execution, who “made no more of his death than if he had been to take a journey.” The divine was fearful that this contempt of death might arise from “a senselessness of his own state,” but the hero satisfied the dean that he died “very Christianly.” Yet the gossip of Aubrey tells, that “his cousin Whitney said, and I think it is printed, that he spake not one word of Christ, but of the great and incomprehensible God with much zeal and adoration, so that he concluded he was an a-Christ, not an a-theist.” In this manner great men were then judged whenever they “ventured at discourse which was unpleasant to the churchmen,” as this confused recorder of curious matters has sent down to us. This indicates that Socinian principles were appearing.
THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHER, DR. DEE.
Atthe dawn of philosophy its dreams were not yet dispersed, and philosophers were often in peril of being as imaginative as poets. The arid abstractions of the schoolmen were succeeded by the fanciful visions of the occult philosophers; and both were but preludes to the experimental philosophy of Bacon and Newton, and the metaphysics of Locke. The first illegitimate progeny of science were deemed occult and even magical; while astronomy was bewildered with astrology, chemistry was running into alchemy, and natural philosophy wantoned in the grotesque chimeras of magical phantoms, the philosophers themselves pursued science in a suspicious secresy, and were often imagined to know much more than the human faculties can acquire. These anagogical children of reverie, straying beyond “the visible diurnal sphere,” elevated above humanity, found no boundary which they did not pass beyond—no profundity which they did not fathom—no altitude on which they did not rest. The credulity of enthusiasts was kept alive by the devices of artful deceivers, and illusion closed in imposture.
Shakspeare, in the person of Prospero, has exhibited the prevalent notions of the judicial astrologer combined with the adept, whose white magic, as distinguished from the black or demon magic, holds an intercourse with purer spirits. Such a sage was
—————transported,And rapt in secret studies;
—————transported,
And rapt in secret studies;
that is, in the occult sciences; and he had
Volumes that he prized more than his dukedom.
These were alchemical, astrological, and cabalistical treatises. The magical part ofThe Tempest, Warton has observed, “is founded on that sort of philosophy which was peculiar toJohn Deeand his associates, and has been called ‘the Rosicrucian.’”
Dr.Deewas a Theurgist, a sort of magician, who imagined that they held communication with angelic spirits, of which he has left us a memorable evidence. His personal history may serve as a canvas for the picture of an occult philosopher—his reveries, his ambition, and his calamity.
Dee was an eminent and singular person, more intimately connected with the patronage of Elizabeth than perhaps has been observed. It was the fate of this scholar to live in the reigns of five of our successive sovereigns, each of whom had some influence on his fortunes. His father, in the household of Henry the Eighth, suffered some “hard-dealing” from this imperious monarch injurious to the inheritance of the son; the harshness of the sire was considered by the royal children, for Edward granted a pension; Mary, in the day of trial, was favourably disposed towards the philosopher; and Elizabeth, a queen well known for her penurious dispensations, at all times promptly supplied the wants of her careless and dreamy sage.
That decision of character which awaits not for any occasion to reveal itself, broke forth in his college-days. His skill in mathematics, and his astronomical observations, had attracted general notice; and in his twentieth year, Dee ventured on the novel enterprise of conferring personally with the learned of the Netherlands. In the reign of Henry the Eighth, little experimental knowledge was to be gathered out of books. Like the ancient, our insular philosophers early travelled to discover those novelties in science which were often limited to the private circle; there were no Royal or Antiquarian Societies, no “Transactions” of science or the arts. Robert Fludd, the great Rosicrucian, who became more famous than Dee in occult studies, before he gave the world his elaborate labours, passed six years in his travels in France, Germany, and Italy.
Our youthful sage on his return to his college presented them with several curious instruments of science which were not then always procurable in the shops of mechanics. Philosophers often made as well as invented their implements. The learned Mercator was renowned for his globes; and mathematical instruments, of a novel construction, were the invention of the scientific Frisias.
Our young philosopher, already suspected of a dangerous intimacy with the astral influences, did not quiet the murmurs by his improved dexterity in mechanics. In the elation of youth, he astounded the marvelling fellows of his college. Dee has himself confessed, that “his boyish attempts and exploits scholastical may not be meet to repeat.” In a lecture, Dee executed a piece of mechanical invention which now would have been pantomimical, but was then necromantic. When a greater magician, Roger Bacon, by his art, had made the apparition of a man to walk from the top of All-Hallows steeple in Oxford to the top of St. Mary’s, this optical illusion had endangered his life; and another great occult philosopher set forth a compassionate apology for the science of optics, but could only allege it was not magical, though it seemed so. Two centuries and a half had not sufficed to enlighten the fellows of a college at Oxford.
Dee has suffered hard measure from those who have only judged of him in the last days of his unprotected distress. In his age, if we except mathematics, there were few demonstrable truths in science; disguised as it was by rank fables and airy hypotheses; nature was not interpreted so often as she was misunderstood. The ideal world seemed hardly more illusive than the material. While his sovereign, and the nation, and foreigners were looking up to the solitary sage, may we not pardon the honest egotism which once declared, that if he had found a Mæcenas, Britain would not have been destitute of an Aristotle?Baconhad not yet appeared; and however we may deem of his aspiration, we cannot censure his judgment in discovering there was yet a vacant seat for him who was worthy to fill it.
Dee was an eminent mathematician, but the early bent of his mind was somewhat fanciful; an inextinguishable ambition to fix the admiration of the world worked on a restless temperament and a long vagrant course of life; and his generous impulses burst into the wild exuberances of the reveries of astrology, alchemy, and the cabbala.
The restlessness of a mind ever escaping from the bounded present to the indefinite future, directed his flight to the University of Louvain; there he attracted a noble crowd from the court of Brussels, whom hecharmed like a new oracle of science. Then he rambled to Paris, to lecture on his favourite Euclid, explaining the elements not only mathematically, but by their application to natural philosophy, like another Pythagoras. A professorship was offered him on any terms; and the curious may still decide on his skill by a remarkable English preface which Dee furnished to the translation of Euclid by Sir Henry Billingsley. Admiration seemed more real to Dee when he attracted it on different spots. Preceded by his reputation, with a name which had received the baptism of fame, he returned homewards, where he had potent friends, in Sir John Cheke and in Cecil, and others who had been his auditors or his pupils; and he was pensioned by the youthful Edward.
In the jealous reign of Mary, he gave umbrage by a correspondence with the confidential servants of the Princess Elizabeth; and Dee had now grown into such repute for his occult sciences, that there was little difficulty in accusing him of practising against the queen by enchantments. Cast into prison, the magician witnessed his “bedfellow,” a meek religious man, dragged to the flames, an incident which long after he could not remember without horror. The spirit of the sovereign fails not to betray itself in each succeeding reign. Mary bound men to the stake, Elizabeth sent them forth into new seas and new lands, and the pacific James, turning them into babbling polemics, only shed much human ink. The inquisitors unexpectedly detected no act of treason; but as possibly he might stand in peril of heresy, they recommended that he should be placed under the surveillance of Bishop Bonner, which probably was a royal protection. It is evident that Mary was as favourably disposed towards the philosopher as were her brother and her sister; and the literary memorial Dee addressed to the queen showed that he had no leisure to become an heresiarch.
Dee proposed “the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and monuments.” These had been lamentably dispersed and wasted by the spoilers of the dissolved monasteries. The moment was favourable for the acquisition, not only by obtaining manuscripts, but by procuring transcripts of all which their possessors would not partwith. In this memorial Dee has recorded, that Cicero’s treatise “De Republica” perished at Canterbury, and it was the single copy which authenticated its existence. With such a collection, he proposed to erect “a library royal”——a future Vatican, or a British Museum! A noble design, when as yet no national institution for general learning existed. This glorious opportunity was lost! Governments rarely comprehend those prescient minds which anticipate wants posterity cannot always supply.
The early intercourse of the Princess Elizabeth with our philosopher suffered no interruption, as we shall have occasion to show, during her protracted reign, notwithstanding the ill fame of his awful skill in the occult sciences. We must throw ourselves into his times to judge of the calamity of this celebrity. This, and the succeeding age, were troubled by the faith of omens, meteors, and of “day-fatality,” combined with the astral influences, malignant witchcraft, and horrible magic. It was only at the close of the seventeenth century, in 1682, that Bayle ventured anonymously in his “Thoughts on Comets,” cautiously to demonstrate that these fugitive bodies in the heavens had no influence whatever over the cabinets of princes! Our own historian, Arthur Wilson, in describing “a blazing star,” opined that it was not sent as “a flambeau” to usher in the funeral of the simple queen of James the First; the Puritan had no notion that heaven would compliment royalty; but he was not the less alarmed for the Protestant interest, as it concerned “the war then breaking out in Bohemia;” and so difficult was it to decide between the two opinions, that Rushworth, who wrote long afterwards, very carefully chronicles both. Such was the philosophy of the Elizabethan age, and truly much later, in France as well as in England.
It was therefore in the spirit of the age that the minister of Elizabeth held a formal conference with Dr. Dee to fix on a fortunate day for the coronation, and which the sage opened to them on “the principles of the most ancient astrologers;” and the Privy Council punctually placed the crown on the head of the Queen of England. Nor was this the only occult lore for which his protection of the queen’s safety was earnestly sought.Dee one morning was hastily summoned to prevent a sudden mischief impending over her majesty’s person. A great puppet of wax, representing the queen, was discovered lying in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, with a huge pin stuck through its breast. Dee undertook to quiet “Her Majesty and the Lords of the Honourable Privy-Council” within a few hours, but first insisted that, in the solemn disenchantment, Mr. Secretary Wilson should stand beside him to witness that Dee only used “godly means.” It is not in our histories of England that we learn the real occasion of the coronation-day of Elizabeth, nor of the panic of “the Privy-Council” on the incident in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields; yet such domestic annals of a people enter into the national character, and have sometimes strangely influenced it.1
Though Dee was imbued with the occult sciences of his age, he ardently cultivated arts and literature which would have honoured him in the present. He had formed a great library, rich in Irish and Welsh and other ancient manuscripts, which probably no other person then possessed;2an observatory where he watched, to read in the volume of the heavens; a laboratory of chemistry where the furnace rarely ceased; and a collection of philosophical instruments, too many of which were deemed magical. All these attested his energetic pursuits, to the manifold injury of a very moderate fortune, and the carelessness of a life of abstraction and reverie.
But his ambition had accomplished its proud object; and on all public events wherein science was concerned, recourse was had to the sage of Mortlake. Camden refers to Dr. Dee’s astronomical observations of a new star whichhad gradually vanished, though the celestial apparition had spread great fears and doubts; but our philosopher entertained the Queen the length of three days with the phenomenon. A more important labour was his reformation of the Gregorian Calendar, which even later mathematicians have deemed correct. The versatility of the pursuits of this scientific man was as remarkable as their ingenuity. In that reign of maritime enterprise many of our adventurers had taken nominal possession of many new countries, and the Queen had expressed a wish to learn their sites. One day, in her garden at Richmond, Dee unrolled to the royal eye a spacious scroll, hydrographical, geographical, and historical, where the rivers were tracked, and the coasts indented, and the authorities of the records inscribed on its page, by which the sovereign founded her title to dominions of which she had not always heard the names.3The genius of Dee was as erratic as the course of life he shortly fell into, but it kept great objects in view; and, as he projected a national library under Mary when literature itself seemed lost, under Elizabeth, when “this incomparable islandish monarchy” was menaced by the foreigner, he investigated “the art of navigation,” and proposed “the perpetual guard and service of a petty navy royal, continually to be maintained without the Queen’s charges or any unpleasant burdens to the Commons.” Our inventor was anticipating our future national greatness, and such minds are only comprehended when they can no longer receive our gratitude.
Our author published eight or ten learned works, and left unfinished fifty, some far advanced.4
The imagination of Dee often predominated over his science; while both were mingling in his intellectual habits, each seemed to him to confirm the other. Prone to the mystical lore of what was termed the occult sciences, (which in reality are no sciences at all, since whatever remains occult ceases to be science,) Dee lost his better genius.
The mathematician whom the sage Burleigh had valued for his correction of the vulgar calendar must have amazed that statesman by a proposal to search for a mine for the royal service! claiming for his sole remuneration a letter patent granting him alltreasure trove, as, in the barbarous law-French, is termed all wealth hidden in the earth, which, no claimant appearing, becomes appropriated by the sovereign. The mysterious agency of thevirgula divina, or the divining rod, was to open the undiscovered mine, and to detect, in its progress, for the use of the bearer, the unsunned gold or silver which some had been foolish enough to inter, and not extract, from the earth.5
The luminous genius who had illustrated the demonstrations of Euclid was penetrating into the arcane caverns of the cabbalists, and in a state of spiritual elevation fell into many a dreamy trance. The soul of the mystic would have passed into the world of spiritual existences, but he was not yet blessed with theurgic faculties, and patiently awaited for the elect. If Dee had many reveries, he had also many disciples both of rank and of name. Whatever a mind thus preoccupied and predisposed earnestly seeks, it usually finds; its own infirm imagination aids the deception of the artful. The elect spirit, long expected, was at last found in the person of Edward Kelley, a young apothecary, but an adept in the secret sciences: his services were engaged at a moderate salary. Kelley had to make his fortune.
ThisKelley, who afterwards became an English alchemist, renowned among the votaries of the hermetic art, and of whom many a golden legend is recorded with which I dare not trust the reader, it appears, once lost his ears at Lancaster for coining; the judges not perhaps distinguishing the process by which the alchemist might have transmuted the baser into the precious metal. This neophyte, moreover, was a wizard—an aspirant in more supernatural arts—an incantator—a spirit-seer! Once with impious temerity he had ventured on questioningthe dead! This “deed without a name” was actually perpetrated amid the powers of darkness in the park of Walton-in-the-dale, in the county of Lancaster. A recent corpse was dragged forth from the churchyard; whether the erected spectre made any sign of resuscitation is not recorded, but it probably did—for it spoke! A voice was heard delivering its short but awful responses, sufficient for the evil curiosity of the guardian of a ward, eager to learn the doomsday of that frail mortal’s existence.
For this tale our antiquaryWeeverhas been quipped by our antiquaryAnthonyàWood, for his excessive credulity, as if Anthony would infer that he himself was incredulous on all supernatural disclosures! The authority was, however, unquestionable, for it came from the agent himself in this dark work, the opener of the grave, the spectator of the grim vaticinator, the listener to the sepulchral voice. He had often related this violation of “God’s acre” to many gentlemen in Lancashire, as well as to the faithful scribe of our “Ancient Funeral Monuments.”
Many strange unexplained accounts have come down to us whereVoiceshave been introduced, and it has been too usual at once to suppose that the attestations were nothing more than what Butler deems “solid lying.” Leibnitz, a philosopher who seems to have delighted in the wonderful, gives an account of a dog who spoke different languages; the evidence is undeniable; and certain it is that the docile animal at his master’s bidding opened his mouth—and good French or Latin was distinctly heard. When the astrologer Lilly assures us of one of the magical crystal globes or mirrors from whence the spirits absolutely gave responses, he has described their tones: “They speak, like the Irish,much in the throat.” “This, if it proves nothing else, will serve to show that the Irish was the primitive language,” sarcastically observes Gifford; but his acumen might have discovered that “it proved” something else, and that Lilly here really delivered a plain truth in this description of thevoiceswhich gave the responses of the spirits.
The art of the ventriloquist to convey his voice to the place he wills—into the gaunt jaws of a dead man’s skull—into the moveable lips of a tutored dog, or into the invisible spirits of a magical globe—may be easily recognised.Ventriloquism has been oftener practised than has been known to the listeners. Speakingmuch in the throatidentifies that factitious voice, which, drawing the air into the lungs, proceeds out of the thorax, and not from a lower region, as the ancient etymology indicated. The Pythonesses of the oracles exercised this faculty, and it was not less skilfully practised by Edward Kelley.
In the theurgic mysteries Dee would not deviate from what he deemed “the most Christian courses;” fervent orisons and other devotional ceremonies were to hallow the cabbalistical invocations,6and the astrological configurations and hieroglyphical cakes of wax, and other magical furniture. Among these was “a showstone,” or an angelical mirror, placed on a pedestal.7By patient inspection at certain more blessed hours, the gifted seer could descry the apparitions of spirits moving within its cloudless orb; for at other times less propitious the surface was indistinct, as if a misty curtain hung over it.8
By what natural progress of incidents the bold inventive genius of Kelley worked this fascination on the fatuity of the visionary might be curious to develope; but he who himself probably had been a dupe was the better adapted to play the impostor. Strange as this incident may appear to us, it was not rare at that day. A communion with invisible spirits entered into the general creedthroughout Europe, and crystal or beryl was the magical medium; but as the gift ofseeingwhat was invisible to every one else was reserved for the elect, it was this circumstance which soon led to impostures. Persons even of ordinary rank in life pretended to be what they termedspeculators, and sometimes women werespeculatrices. Often by confederacy, and always by a vivacious fancy, these jugglers poured out their several artful revelations. We now may inscribe as an historical fact in the voluminous annals of human folly, from which, however, we have hardly yet wholly escaped, imaginary beings, and incantation of spirits, and all spectral apparitions.
Kelley was now installed into the office ofSkryer; a term apparently of Dee’s invention. Listening to the revelations of angelic spirits and to the mysterious secret, the alchemist inflamed the cabbalistical faith of the visionary. It is certain that Dee now abandoned his mundane studies, and for many a year, through some thousands of pages, when Kelley was in the act of “skrying,” sate beside “the show-stone,” the eager scribe of those imagined conferences with “the spirits,” received, to use his own words, “through the eye and the ear of E. K.” Kelley was a person of considerable fancy, which sometimes approached to a poetical imagination; the masquerade of his spiritual beings is remarkable for its fanciful minuteness. Voices were at times audible to Dee; but the terrific noises of supernatural agency which sometimes accompanied the visions could only have been heard by the poetical ear of Kelley, though assuredly they shook the doctor. I will give the reader a notion of one of these scenes.
E. K. looking into the show-stone, said, “I see a garland of white rose-buds about the border of the stone: they be well opened, but not full out.”
Δ “The great mercies of God be upon us; we beseech him to increase our faith.”
E. K. “Amen! But while I consider these buds better they seem rather to be white lilies.”
Δ “The eternal God wipe away our blackness, and make us purer and whiter than snow.”
E. K. “They are 72 in number (angels), seeming with their headsalternatim, seeming with their heads onetowards me and one towards you. A voice cometh shouting out from the lilies, and all the lilies are become on fire. I hear a sound as though it were of many waters poured or streaming down in the clifts of great rocks and mountains. The noise is marvellous great; I hear it as afar off, and through the stone, or as it were of a thousand water-mills going together.”
A Voice.“Est. Et quo modo est?”
Another Voice.“Male et in summo: et mensuratum est.”
E. K. “I hear a great roaring, as if it were out of a cloud over one’s head, not perfectly like thunder.”
Another Voice.“The Seal is broken!”
E. K. “Now I see beyond like a furnace-mouth as big as four or five gates of a city, as if it were a quarter of a mile off, with a horrible smother of smoke coming out of it; and by it a great lake of pitch, and it bubbleth or simpereth as water doth when it beginneth to seethe. There standeth by the pit a white man in a white garment tucked up; his face is marvellous fair: this white spiritual creature saith, ‘My Lord,Ascend!’”
E. K. “Now there cometh out a thing like a lion in the hinder parts, and his fore parts hath many heads of divers fashions upon one trunk; he hath like feathers on his neck; his heads are seven, three on one side, and three on another, and one in the middle, longer than the rest, lying backward to his tailward. The white man giveth him a bloody sword, and he taketh it in his fore-foot. The white man tieth this monster’s fore-legs with a chain, that he cannot go but as one shackled. Now he giveth the monster a great hammer with a seal at that end where the hammer striketh. The white man has cried with a loud cry, ‘A horrible and terrible beast!’ The white man taketh the hammer and striketh him in the forehead of that head which is in the middle. Now all this vision is vanished away: the stone is clear.”
On another occasion E. K. says, “I hear a marvellous noise, as of many mountains: which of the mouths do speak I cannot discern. I hear a greater noise still; I never heard any such noise; it is as if half the world were rushing down a hill.”9
During two years, in which Dee deserted his studies and sacrificed his fortune, the name of Dee still remained so eminent that learned foreigners in their visits to England continued their inquiries after him. A Polish prince, Albert a’Laski, who was received with high honours at our court, applied to the Earl of Leicester for an introduction to the great English philosopher, and the Earl appointed a day to dine with Dr. Dee. Then it was that our philosopher disclosed his mortifying condition, that he could no longer entertain his noble guests without selling his plate. The Queen instantly sent him forty angels in gold. The illustrious Polander became a constant visitor, was initiated into the theurgic mysteries; there came a whisper from the unseen “spirits” that this palatine of Siradia might yet be the elected King of Poland! Ambitious princes are as credulous as ambitious philosophers. The predictors of a crown, with a royal exchequer from the alchemists, seduced the imagination, and a’Laski invited the sages with their families to reside at his castle.
There the Polish lord seems to have wearied of the angelic communications; he transferred them to the Emperor, Rodolph, the Second, at Prague. In all thecourts of Europe, occult philosophers found a ready admittance.
Dee came auspiciously recommended to the emperor; for our author had formerly dedicated to the emperor’s father, Maximilian, his cabbalistical volume, which, when admitted to a private interview with Rodolph, the sage beheld lying open on the table.10The introduction of an author to an emperor by his own work may have something really magical in its effect, provided the spell is not disturbed by him who raised it. In an inflated oration Dee announcing himself like a babbling missionary, as a messenger from angels, the emperor curtly observed that he did not understand Latin! The Pope’s Nuncio opportunely demanded that the two English necromancers should be questioned at Rome. Their flight relieved the emperor. A Bohemian count rejoiced to receive the fugitives at his castle of Trebona, where strange alchemical projections of pewter flagons turned into silver, which the goldsmiths of Prague bought, are attested solemnly by Arthur Dee, the son of the doctor, to the philosophical Sir Thomas Browne. This must have been that day of elation which Dee entered in his diary. “Master Edward Kelley did open the great secret to me. God be thanked!” This Arthur Dee, indeed, remained an inveterate alchemist all his life; but the man who in his medical character was recommended by James the First to the Czar of Russia, and, after several years’ residence at Moscow, on his return home, was appointed physician to Charles the First, would be a reputable witness in any court of law.11
Dee and Kelley were abroad, living together, from 1583 to 1589. Their adventures would form a romance, but I am not writing one. Their condition was mysterious, as were the incidents of their lives. Sometimes reduced to the most pitiable necessities for “meat and drink;” at other times we find Dee travelling with a princely equipage, in three family coaches, a train of waggons, and an escort of fifty horsemen. These extraordinary personages long attracted the wonder of the Continent; but whatever happened, their fortunes were variable. The pride of Dee was sensitive—there are querulous entries in his diary—there appeared some false play in his dangerous coadjutor—Kelley was dropping hints that he lived in a miserable state of delusion—preludes to the great rupture! Mephistopheles menaced his victim. It is evident that Kelley determined to break up the profitless partnership and set up for himself. The noise the parties raised in their quarrels on the Continent induced Elizabeth to command their return.12The alchemist did not return home with Dee. He obtained the patronage of the emperor, and was created a knight; but as usually happened with great alchemists, Sir Edward Kelley was twice cast into prison. Sir Edward, however, continued his correspondence with Dee, and sent her majesty a timely information of some design against her person. This adventurer may appear a very suspicious personage. Lord Burleigh addresses this “Baron of Bohemia,” as the minister designates him, with high respect and admiration, for his “virtues, his wisdom, and learning.” However, in the same confidential letter, his lordship informs “the good knight” of some malicious reports; that “he did not come home, because he could not perform that, indeed, which has been reported of him:” and others had gone so far as to deem Sir Edward “an impostor.” This letter, written by Burleigh’s own hand,13shows the skilful falconer luring the bird. Dee assured the queen that “the Baron of Bohemia” positivelypossessed the secret of the great operation. The queen anxiously concerted measures to secure the escape of Sir Edward Kelley from his second imprisonment. Agents were despatched, the jailers were drugged, the horses were awaiting for the fugitive; scaling the wall, he fell, and died of his contusions, thus abruptly closing the romance of a daring disturbed spirit.
Dee returned to England in December, 1589, and presenting himself to the queen at Richmond, was received, as he was ever accustomed to be, with all graciousness. But the philosopher, after the absence of six years, returning to his studious abode, beheld it nearly dismantled; his chemical apparatus, with all his scientific implements, had been destroyed by a mob, and his library pillaged. Every day this victim of science experienced the effects of popular obloquy. He gathered up what fragments he could; and again rapt in study, he again relapsed into his old wants. Theres angusta domionce more disturbed his lares. Yet the queen was not unmindful of her philosopher; Mr. Cavendish was despatched to assure him that he might freely pursue his studies, and brought a royal Christmas gift of two hundred angels in gold, to be renewed with the season.
But the old man craved more than an uncertain eleemosynary bounty; his creditors multiplied, and the great will forget the man whom they rarely see. Dee has feelingly classed those who had outwearied his generous nature, “the ungrateful and the thankless; and the scorners and disdainers.” The royal hand alone could repair his injuries, and vindicate his genius. Dee addressed a memorial to the queen, praying that a commission might be appointed to inquire into his case, which, as he energetically expressed himself, had been “written with tears of blood.” He did not draw up his petition as an illustrious pauper, but as a claimant for services performed.
A commission was immediately assigned, and it was followed by a literary scene of singular novelty.
Dee, sitting in his library, received the royal commissioners. Two tables were arranged; on one lay all the books he had published, with his unfinished manuscripts; the most extraordinary one was an elaborate narrative of the transactions of his own life. This manuscript his secretaryread, and as it proceeded, from the other table Dee presented the commissioners with every testimonial; these vouchers consisted of royal letters from the queen, and from princes, ambassadors, and the most illustrious persons of England and of Europe: passports which traced his routes, and journals which noted his arrivals and departures: grants and appointments, and other remarkable evidences; and when these were wanting, he appealed to living witnesses.
Among the employments which he had filled, he particularly alludes to “a painful journey in the winter season, of more than fifteen hundred miles, to confer with learned physicians on the Continent, about her majesty’s health.” He showed the offers of many princes to the English philosopher to retire to their courts, and the princely establishment at Moscow proffered by the czar; but he had never faltered in his devotion to his sovereign. He appealed to the clerks of the records of the Tower, and to other antiquaries,14for his free distribution of the manuscripts which he had often discovered. He complains that his house at Mortlake was too public for his studies, and incommodious for receiving the numerous foreign literati who resorted to him. Of all the promised preferments, he would have chosen the Mastership of St. Cross for its seclusion. Here is a great man making great demands, but reposing with dignity on his claims; his wants were urgent, but the penury was not in his spirit. The commissioners, as they listened to this autobiography, must often have raised their eyes in wonder on the venerable and dignified author before them.
The report was most favourable; the queen spontaneously declared that Dee should have St. Cross, and the incumbent might be removed to a bishopric. She allotted him a considerable pension, and commanded Lady Howard to write “words of comfort” to his wife; and further sent an immediate supply by the hands of Sir Thomas Gorge. The letter to his wife and the ready money were, however, the only tangible gift, for St. Cross and the pension he never received!
Two years after we find Dee still memorialising. He published “A Letter Apologetical, with a Plain Demonstration and Fervent Protestation for the Course of the Philosophical Studies ofa Certain Studious Gentleman,” 1599. This was a vindication against the odium of magical practices. At length, the archbishop installed him in the wardenship of Manchester College; but though our adventurer now drew into harbour, it was his destiny to live in storms. The inmates always suspected him of concealing more secrets of nature than he was willing to impart; and the philosopher who had received from great men in Europe such testimonies of their admiration, now was hourly mortified by the petty malice of the obscure fellows of his college. After several years of contention, he resigned a college which no occult arts he possessed could govern.
His royal patroness was no more. The light and splendour of the Court had sunk beneath the horizon; and in the chill evening of his life the visionary looked up to those who were not susceptible of his innocent sorcery. Still retaining his lofty pretensions, he addressed the King, and afterwards the parliament. He implored to be freed from vulgar calumnies, and to be brought to trial, that a judicial sentence might clear him of all those foul suspicions which had clouded over his days for more than half a century. It is to be regretted that this trial did not take place; the accusations and the defence would have supplied no incurious chapter in the history of the human mind. A necromancer, and a favourite with Elizabeth, was not likely to be tolerated in the Court of James the First. Cecil, who when young had been taught by his father to admire the erudition of the reformer of the Gregorian calendar, was not the same person in the Court of James the First as in that of Elizabeth; he resigned the sage to his solitude, and, with the policy of the statesman, only reasonably enough observed, that “Dee would shortly go mad!”
Misfortune could neither break nor change the ambitious spirit of the deserted philosopher. He still dreamed in a spiritual world which he never saw nor heard, and hopefully went on working his stills, deprived of the powder of projection. He sold his books for a meal; and if thegossiper Aubrey may be trusted, in such daily distress he may have practised on the simplicity of his humble neighbours, by sometimes recovering a stolen basket of linen, though it seems he refused the more solemn conjuration of casting a figure for a stray horse! It is only in this degradation of sordid misery that he is shown to us in theAlchemistof Jonson. Weary, as he aptly expresses himself, of “sailing against the wind’s eye,” in 1608, in the eighty-first year of his age, he resolved to abandon his native land. There was still another and a better world for the pilgrim of science; and it was during the preparations to rejoin his Continental friends in Germany that death closed all future sorrows.
It was half a century after the decease of Dr. Dee, that the learned Meric Casaubon amazed the world by publishing the large folio containing “A True and Faithful Relation of what passed many Years between Dr.John DeeandSOME SPIRITS,” 1659, from a copy in the Cottonian Library. Yet is this huge volume but a torso; the mighty fragments, however, were recovered from the mischances of a kitchen fire, by Elias Ashmole, a virtuoso in alchemy and astrology, who toiled and trembled over the mystical and almost the interminable quires. Such is the fate of books! the world will for ever want the glorious fragments of Tacitus and Livy, but they have Dee passingly entire.15
Meric Casaubonwas the learned son of a more learned father, but his erudition much exceeded his judgment. He had written a treatise against the delusions of “Enthusiasm,” from whence the author derived but little benefit; for he demonstrated the existence of witches. Yet Meric Casaubon, meek and honest, was solicited by Cromwell to become his historiographer; but from principle he declined the profit and the honour; during the Oliverian rule, he became an hypochondriac, and has prefixed an hypochondriacal preface to this unparalleled volume. His faith is obsequious, and he confirms the verity of these conferences with “spirits,” by showing that others before Dee hadenjoyed such visitations. The fascination of a conference with “spirits” must have entered into the creed even of higher philosophers; for we are startled by discovering that the great Leibnitz observed on this preface, that “it deserves to be translated,as well as the work itself!”16
When this book of marvels was first published, the world was overcome by the revelations. Those saintly personages, whose combined wisdom then assisted the councils of England, Owen, Goodwin, Nye, and others of that sort, held a solemn consistory for the suppression of the book. They entertained a violent suspicion that the whole of this incomprehensible jargon was a covert design by some of the Church of England party, by a mockery of their own style, to expose the whole sainthood, who pretended so greatly to inspiration. But the bomb exploded at once, and spread in all directions; and ere they could fit and unfit their textual debates, the book had been eagerly bought, and placed far beyond the reach of suppression.17
The “True Relation of what passed many Years between Dr.DeeandSOME SPIRITS,” long excited curiosity which no one presumed to satisfy. During no less a period than five-and-twenty years was Dee recording what he terms his “Actions with Spirits,” for all was written by his own hand. It would be an extravagant inference to conclude that a person of blameless character and grave habits would persevere through a good portion of his life in the profitless design of leaving a monument of posthumous folly solely to mystify posterity. Some fools of learning, indeed, have busied themselves in forging antiquities to bewilder some of their successors, but these malicious labours were the freaks of idle hours, not the devotion of a life. Even the imposture of Kelley will not wholly account for the credulity of Dee; for many years after their separation, and to his last days, Dee sought for and at length found another “Skryer.”18Are we to resolvethese “Actions with Spirits” by the visions of another sage, a person eminent for his science, and a Rosicrucian of our own times,—that illustrious Emanuel Swedenborg, who, in his reveries, communed with spirits and angels? It would thus be a great psychological phenomenon which remains unsolved.
No one has noticed that a secret communication, uninterrupted through the protracted reign of Elizabeth, existed between the Queen and the philosopher. The deep interest her Majesty took in his welfare is strikingly revealed to us. Dee, in his frequent troubles, had constantly recourse to the Queen, and she was ever prompt at his call. The personal attentions of the Queen often gratified his master-passion—often she sent kind messages by her ladies and her courtiers—often was he received at Greenwich, Richmond, and at Windsor; and he was singularly honoured by her Majesty’s visits at his house in Mortlake. The Queen would sometimes appear waiting before his garden, when he would approach to kiss her hand and solve some difficult inquiry she had prepared for him. On one of these occasions Dee exhibited to her Majesty a concave mirror; a glass which had provoked too much awful discussion, but which would charm the Queen while this Sir David Brewster of his age condescended to explain the optical illusions. When Dee, in his travels, was detained by sickness in Lorraine, her Majesty despatched two of her own physicians to attend on this valued patient. The Queen incessantly made golden promises of preferment; many eminent appointments were fixed on. He had, too, a patron in Leicester, the favourite of Elizabeth, for in that terrible state-libel of “Leicester’s Commonwealth,” among the instruments of that earl’s dark agencies we discover “Dee and Allen, two atheists, for figuring and conjuring,” that is, for astrological diagrams and magical invocations!19As, notwithstanding the profusion ofthe Queen’s designs for his promotion, he received but little, and that little late, the sincerity of the royal patron has been arraigned. Mysterious as the philosopher’s cabbalistic jargon with which he sometimes entertained her, her Majesty seems to have remunerated empty phrases by providing notional places; but Elizabeth may not have deserved this hard censure; she unfailingly supplied her money-gifts, a certain evidence of her sincerity! The truth seems to be that royal promises may be frustrated by intervening competitors and ministerial expedients. At the Court, the evil genius of Dee stood ever by his side, saluting the philosopher with no friendly voice, as “the arch-conjuror of the whole kingdom!” The philosopher struggled with the unconquerable prejudices of the age.
If we imagine that Elizabeth only looked on Dee as the great alchemist who was to replenish her coffers, or the mystic who propounded the world of spirits, this would not account for the Queen permitting Dee to remain on the Continent during six years. Had such been the Queen’s hopes, she would have hermetically sealed the philosopher in his house at Mortlake, where in her rides to Richmond she might conveniently have watched the progress of gold-making and listened to the theurgic revelations. Never would she have left this wanderer from court to court, with the chance of conveying to other princes such inappreciable results of the occult sciences.
What then was the cause of this intimate intercourse of the Queen with Dr. Dee; and what the occasion of that mysterious journey of fifteen hundred miles in the winter season to consult physicians on her Majesty’s health, of which he had reminded the Queen by her commissioners, but which they could not have comprehended? Did these mysterious physicians reside in one particular locality; and in the vast intervening distance were there no skilful physicians equally able for consultation?
A casual hint dropped by Lilly, the famous astrologer, will unveil the mysterious life of Dee during his six years’ residence abroad. Lilly tells us that “for many years, in search of the profounder studies, he travelled into foreignparts;to be serious, he was Queen Elizabeth’s intelligencer, and had a salary for his maintenance from the secretaries of state.” Lilly, who is correct in his statements except on the fabulous narratives of his professional art, must have written from some fact known to him; and it harmonizes with an ingenious theory to explain the unintelligible diary of Dee, suggested by Dr.Robert Hooke, the eminent mathematician.
Hooke, himself a great inventor in science, entertained a very high notion of the scientific character of Dee, and of his curiosity and dexterity in the philosophical arts—optics, perspective, and mechanics. Deeply versed in chemistry, mathematics, and the prevalent study of astrology, like another Roger Bacon (or rather a Baptista Porta), delighting in the marvellous of philosophical experiments, he was sent abroad to amuse foreign princes, while he was really engaged by Elizabeth in state affairs. Hooke, by turning over the awful tome, and comparing several circumstances with the history of his own life, was led to conclude that “all which relates to the spirits, their names, speeches, shows, noises, clothing, actions, &c., were allcryptography; feigned relations, concealing true ones of a very different nature.” It was to prevent any accident, lest his papers should fall into hostile hands, that he preferred they should appear as the effusions of a visionary, rather than the secret history of a real spy. When the spirits are described as using inarticulate words, unpronounceable according to the letters in which they are written, he conjectured that this gibberish would be understood by that book of Enoch which Dee prized so highly, and which Hooke considered to contain the cypher. Hooke, however, has not deciphered any of these inarticulate words; but as the book of Enoch seems still to exist, this Apocalypse may yet receive its commentator, a task which it appears Dr. Adam Clarke once himself contemplated.20
There is one fatal objection to this ingenious theory of cryptography; this astounding diary opens long before Dee went abroad, and was continued long after his return, when it does not appear that he was employed in affairs of state.