[16] “General Dictionary,” by Birch, art. Meric Casaubon—Note B.
[17] This literary anecdote I derive from a manuscript and contemporary note in the printed copy at the British Museum.
[18] This office of “skryer” is ambiguous—no dictionary will assist us. “In the year before he died, 1607, Dee procured one Bartholomew Hickman to serve him in the same manner as Kelley had done.”—Biog. Brit., v. 43. In what manner? Did Hickman pretend to descry the “actions of the spirits” in the show-stone, or only to drudge on the powder of projection? Forty years have elapsed since I turned over the interminable “Diary,” and now my eyes are dim and my courage gone. I suspect, however, that that magical herb—eye-bright, however administered, will fail to penetrate through the darkness which surrounds the chaotic mass of manuscript.
[19] It requires a late posterity to correct the gross prejudices of contemporaries; it was not the least of the honours which Dee enjoyed to have been closely united with the studies of the “atheist” Allen, “the father of all learning and virtuous industry, infinitely beloved and admired by the court and the university.” The ardent eulogy of Wood is earnest.—Athen. Oxon., ii. 541.
[20] “As it is asserted that the six books of Mysteries transcribed from the papers of Dr. John Dee, by Elias Ashmole, Esqre., preserved in the Sloane Library, (Plutarch XVI., G,) are a collection of papers relative to State Transactions between Elizabeth, her Ministers, and different Foreign Powers, in which Dr. Dee was employed sometimes as an official agent openly, and at other times as a Spy, I purpose to make an extract from the whole work, and endeavour, if possible, to get a key to open the Mysteries. A. C.”—Cat. of Adam Clarke’s MSS.
THE ROSACRUSIAN FLUDD.
The confraternity of the Rose-cross long attracted public notice. Congenial with the more ancient freemasonry, it was probably designed for a more intellectual order; it was entitled “The Enlightened,” “The Immortal,” and “The Invisible.” Its name has been frequently used to veil mysteries, to disguise secret agents, and to carry on those artful impostures which we know have been practised on infirm credulity by the dealers in thaumaturgical arts, to a very recent period. The modern illuminati, of whom not many years past we heard so much, are conjectured to have branched out of the sublime society of the Rose-cross.
This mystical order sprung up among that mystical people, the Germans, who are to this day debating on its origin, for, like other secret societies, its concealed source eludes the search. It was at the beginning of the seventeenth century that a German divine, John Valentine Andreæ, a scholar of enlarged genius, in his controversial writings amused his readers by certain mysterious allusions to a society for the regeneration of science and religion; in the ambiguity of his language, it remained doubtful whether the society was already instituted, or was to be instituted. Suddenly a new name was noised through Europe, the name of Christian Rosencreutz, the founder three centuries back of a secret society, and a eulogy of the order was dispersed in five different languages.