CHAPTER I. 

 TWO ENGLISH ADVENTURERS. 



"Learning, that cobweb of the brain, 

 Profane, erroneous and vain; 

 A trade of knowledge as replete, 

 As others are with fraud and cheat ; 

 An art t'incumber gifts and wit 

 And render both for nothing fit." 



Butler. 



N THE reign of Queen Elizabeth there lived at Mort- 

 lake, on the banks of the river Thames, a very 

 learned man named John Dee, popularly called 

 Doctor Dee, who was at the time in which we first 

 meet him about fifty-six years of age, and had a great repu- 

 tation in England as a scholar, an astrologer, an alchemist 

 and a necromancer. In his youth he had been a tremendously 

 hard student, first at St. John's College, Cambridge, and 

 then as a fellow of Trinity, devoting eighteen hours daily to 

 study, four to sleep, and but two to refreshment and recrea- 

 tion, application which if not destructive to health could 

 hardly fail to lay the foundations of great erudition. When 

 twenty years old he visited the Low Countries, pursuing his 

 favorite studies, mathematics and astronomy, at the Uni- 

 versity of Louvain, and buying newly devised astronomical 

 instruments of superior make ; later he read lectures on Euclid 



