this adventure, the girl believed that it was written in the book of fate and willingly agreed to undertake it.
The
great humorous poem "Hudibras," wherein all the foibles of the
seventeenth century are castigated, does not fail to make mention of
Dee and Kelley and their crystal. Of the sorcerer whose aid Hudibras
seeks we are told:28
He'd read Dee's prefaces before,
The Dev'l and Euclid o'er and o'er;
And all th' intrigues 'twixt him and Kelley,
Lascus and th' Emperor, would tell ye.
Kelley
did all his feats upon The devil's looking-glass, a stone Where,
playing with him at bo-peep He solved all problems ne'er so deep.
In
his experiments in crystal-gazing, Dr. Dee evidently used more than
one crystal, and did not indeed confine the operations of his scryer or
scryers to brilliant spheres. In the collection of Horace Walpole, at
Strawberry Hill, was a polished slab of black stone, obsidian, from
Mexico. This came into the possession of Mr. Smythe Piggott and later
(1853) into that of Lord Londesborough; it is now in the collection of
Prince Alexis Soltykoff. Horace Walpole wrote a label for the stone, in
which he says that it had long been owned by the Mordaunts, Earls of
Peters-borough, and was described in the catalogue of their collection
as the black stone into which Dr. Dee used to call his spirits. Later
it was owned by John Campbell, Duke of Argyle, who gave it to Horace
Wal-
28Butler,
"Hudibras," Part II, Canto III, 11, 235-8, and 631-4. This second part
was issued in 1663, four years after Casau-bon's publication of Dee's
journal.
