[1] About the same time, in 1574, Ruggeiri, a Florentine, was condemned to the galleys for having conspired against the French monarch in favour of the Duke of Alençon, his brother. The act of treason consisted in making an image of wax, the perfect likeness of Charles the Ninth, which had a heart pricked with pins. This was the exact peril into which our English queen had been cast—probably by some Romanist who fancied himself, or herself, to be an adept.
[2] A catalogue of Dr. Dee’s library, in his own handwriting, may be found in Harl. MSS. 1879. Four thousand volumes, “abounding with a curious harvest of books illustrative of the occult art,” but also containing the ancient classics. He expended on his collections the considerable sum of “thirty hundred pounds,” as he tells us, for at that day they counted by “hundreds.”
[3] These ingenious rolls, or maps, are now deposited among the Cottonian manuscripts.
[4] The curious catalogue of both is found in the “Biog. Britannica.” Dee would have printed more of his writings, but he found the printers too often adverse to his hopes, as “few men’s studies were in such matters employed.” One of his manuscripts was so voluminous, containing an account of his “Inventions,” being “greater than the English Bible,” that it appeared “so dreadful to the printers,” that our philosopher postponed its publication to “a sufficient opportunity,” which never occurred.
These unfinished writings are scattered in the Cottonian and the Ashmolean Collections, for their learned founders anxiously recovered them.
The naval project appears in a singular volume, entitled “General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, 1577, folio.” The author printed only one hundred copies, which he distributed among confidential friends, patriotically refusing a considerable offer for a copy by a foreign Power. This volume is said to be one of the scarcest books in the English language. A copy at the British Museum contains notes in the handwriting of Dee himself, fraught with his usual sorrows; his representation of his affairs is not luminous, and seems written with a dulled spirit—querulous and involved.
[5] The mystery of the divining rod is as ancient as the days of Cicero. The German miners introduced its practice among our Cornish miners. Childrey, in his “Britannia Baconiana, or the Natural Rarities of England, Scotland, and Wales,” 1661, cautiously describes, as a disciple of Bacon should, its effects on mines of lead in Somersetshire. Boyle and the Royal Society were perplexed by the evidence. We have accounts from some, unimpeachable for integrity, of the agitation of the divining rod as authentic and incomprehensible as any recorded of animal magnetism. A few years ago, a learned writer in the “Quarterly Review” surprised us by reviving the phenomenon, in the history of it, as performed by a lady of distinction, in the present day, searching for a spring of water.
Many frauds have succeeded by this pretended rod of divination. The reader may consult Le Brun’s “Histoire Critique des Pratiques Superstitieuses” for “La Baguette;” but, above all, a philosophical article by the scientific BIOT, in “Biog. Universelle,” art. Ayman Jacques. [An account of its use at Freiburg in discovering silver mines, and a picture of its form, may be seen in Dr. Brown’s “Travels in Germany,” 4to, 1677, p. 136.]
The divining rod consists simply of a hazel bough forked: the bearer firmly grasps the two pointed ends, holding it before him; it must bend, or become agitated, when it indicates the spot which conceals a spring of water, or buried metal. In the hands of a susceptible agent tremulous nerves, in the solemn operation, would be likely to communicate their irritability to the hazel bough. But who has enjoyed the magic of the treasure trove? The divining-rod, described as the Mosaical rod, furnishes an incident in “The Antiquary” of Sir Walter Scott, which was probably borrowed from an amusing incident in the Life of Lilly the astrologer; where we discover that David Ramsay, his majesty’s clockmaker, having heard of a great treasure in the Cloyster of Westminster Abbey, came at midnight, accompanied by one of the elect, with the Mosaical rods—“on the west side of the Cloyster the hazle rods turned over another.” David Ramsay had brought a great sack to hold the treasure, when suddenly all the demons issued out of their beds in a storm, that—“we verily believed the west end of the church would have fallen.” The torches were suddenly extinguished, the rods would not move, and they returned home faster than they came.
[6] Sloane MSS., 3191.