The visitor was at length ushered into the presence of this celebrated scholar and professor of the celestial sciences, whose predictions at one period astonished Europe; his presence, like some portentous comet, threatening war and disaster, perplexing even emperors and princes, and filling them with apprehension and dismay.  But Dee was somewhat fallen from this high and dangerous celebrity.  He was become querulous and ill-tempered.  Never satisfied with his present condition, but always aiming at some greater thing, he generally contrived to lose what he already possessed.  At one time, to control the destinies and acquire the supreme direction of affairs, either as the High Priest or the Grand Lama of Europe, was not beyond the compass of his thoughts or the scope of his ambition.  Now, he was petitioning the Queen for a small increase to his worldly pittance, and an opportunity of clearing himself before her Majesty’s council from the foul and slanderous accusations by which he was continually assailed.  Yet he had not abandoned his former projects.  Though failing in his mission aforetime to the Emperor of Germany, the King of Poland, and others, to whom he evidently went for political purposes, and with offers of his aid, through the foreknowledge and spiritual intercourse by which he thought himself favoured, yet he still cherished the hope of promotion by such visionary follies.  That chimera of the imagination, the invention of the philosopher’s stone, still haunted him, and he did not yet despair of one day becoming a ruler among princes, the supreme arbiter and depositary of the fate of nations.

The delusions imposed on him by Kelly, his seer and confederate, had so impressed him with this belief, that he still purposed going abroad on a divine mission, as he called it, and only awaited the auspicious time when his spiritual instructors should point out another seer in Kelly’s room, from whom he had been long separated.  Though now in his seventy-first year, he was not deterred from making another attempt to reach the goal of his ambition.  Such is the folly and madness of these enthusiasts, that, let them be never so often foiled in their inordinate expectations, yet does it in no wise hinder, but, on the contrary, sets them more fully on their desire.  Casaubon, in his preface to the account of Dee’s intercourse with spirits, gives a strange instance of their infatuation.  He says:—­

“In the days of Martin Luther, there lived one Michael Stifelius, who applying to himself some place of the Apocalypse, took upon himself to prophesy.  He foretold that in the year of the Lord 1533, before the 29th of September, the end of the world and Christ’s coming to judgment would be.  He did show so much confidence that, some write, Luther himself was somewhat startled at the first.  But that day past, he came a second time to Luther, with new calculations, and had digested the whole business into twenty-two articles,