3

"I most humbly beseech thee consider these promises thus to me propounded. If they be true and from thee, confirm them. If they be illusions and not from thee, disprove them. For hardly in my judgment they do or can agree with our former precepts and order taken by thee."

And again, in an agony:

"O Lord, I doubt of these promises of ease, wealth, and honour: I suspect the whole apparition of the eleven to be an illusion. O confirm my judgment or disprove it."

So he seeks for a revelation of guidance, writes letters to Laski, and waits. Soon he perceives these temptations to have come from "a very foolish devil." He decides that they will continue to throw in their lot with Laski, who rejoined them in Lubeck. He left again to visit the Duke of Mecklenburg, they meanwhile going by Wismar to Rostock and Stettin, which place they reached at ten o'clock on Christmas morning. Laski joined them in a fortnight. They passed on by Stayard to Posen, where Dee adds an antiquarian note that the cathedral church was founded in 1025, and that the tomb of Wenceslaus, the Christian king, is of one huge stone. It was here that Dee began to enter curous notes about Kelly in the Liber Peregrinationis, written in Greek characters, but the words are Latin words, or more frequently English. The supposition is that Kelly was unacquainted even with the Greek alphabet. Dee kept his other foreign diary, written in an Ephemerides Coelestium (printed in Venice, 1582), secret from his partner, for Kelly had obtained possession of an earlier one kept in England and had written in it unfavourable comments, as well as erased things, about himself. Dee had the last word, and has added above Kelly's "shameful lye," "This is Mr. Talbot's, his own writing in my boke, very unduely as he came by it." The various diaries sound, perhaps, confusing to the reader, but are really quite simple. By the private diary is meant the scraps in the Bodleian Almanacs, edited by Halliwell for the Camden Society, in which he seldom alludes to psychic affairs. The Book of Mysteries is the diary in which he relates all the history of the crystal gazing. The printed version (True Relation) begins with Laski's visit to Mortlake on May 28, 1583.

Winter had now set in with unwonted rigour, and one is amazed at the celerity with which this great caravanserai of people and goods pushed on from place to place. From Stettin to Posen, for instance, is more than 200 miles, and it ws accomplished within four days and apparently with only one stop. Then southwards into the watery district between the Oder and the Warthe, where the country was so icebound that they had to employ five-and-twenty men to cut the ice for their coaches for a distance as long as two English miles. On February 3 they reached Lask, on the Prince's own property, and at last were comfortably housed in the Provost's "fair house by the Church." Here Dee was ill with ague, but the table was set up, and a new spirit called Nalvage appeared in teh globe. Nalvage's "pysiognomy was like the picture of King Edward the Sixth. His hair hangeth downa quarter of the length of the cap, somewhat curling, yellow." Dee, of course, had seen the young King when he presented his books, so this is a first-hand reminiscence. Nalvage stood upon a round table of mother-of-pearl, and revealed to them many cabalistic mysteries, tables of letters and names. There was a terrible vision of Mrs. Dee lying dead, with her face all battered in, and of the maid Mary being pulled our of a pool of water half drowned. But it seems to portent no more than did another piece of ill news conveyed at the same time: "Sir Harry Sidney died upon Wednesday last. A privy enemy of yours." Dee says, "I ever took him for one of my chief friends," and adds, with unconscious humour:

"Note. At Prague, Aug. 24, I understood that Sir H. Sidney was not dead in February nor March, no, not in May last. Therefore this must be considered. Doctor Hagek, his son, told me."