Of the numerous family that had once gathered round his hearth few remained at the time of his dissolution, death or estrangement having removed nearly all. His son Michael had died in infancy. His busy, shrewish wife died on the 23rd March, 1605. Of the other seven children Katherine was the only one who clung to him to the last. Rowland, on completing his studies at the Manchester Grammar School, obtained an exhibition at Oxford, but of his subsequent career nothing is known, nor, with the exception of Arthur, can we trace anything of the after-history of the others. Arthur, his first-born, resided in Manchester for some time, and subsequently practised as a physician. He married Isabella, one of the daughters of Edmund Prestwich, of Hulme Hall, and afterwards was chosen physician to Michael III., the first Czar of Russia, and for many years he resided in that country, where his wife died, July 6, 1634, after having borne him 12 children. Returning to England, he was sworn physician to Charles I., and located himself at Norwich, where he continued to reside until his death, September, 1651. Anthony à Wood, in his Athenæ, mentions that Arthur Dee, when an old man, spoke in full confidence of his father’s goodness and sincerity, and affirmed that in his youth, when he had initiated him in some of his mystical pursuits, he had seen enough to satisfy him that he had discovered many marvellous secrets, and only lacked the means to make them available. The son may not have been altogether an impartial witness, but it would be unfair to judge the father by the standard of the present day.
Dee lived in an age when everybody believed in the occult sciences, and in the power of summoning visitants from the world of shadows by incantations and other mysterious means. Half a century before his death he had been pre-eminent for his learning, his eloquence, and his scientific attainments, and he was undoubtedly one of the great lights of his era. Camden styled him nobilis mathematicus, and he may fairly be accounted the prophet of the arts which Bacon and Newton were afterwards to reveal. A ripe scholar, well skilled in chemistry, mathematics, and mechanics, and the master of the whole circle of the liberal arts as then understood—
He sought and gathered for our use the true.
He was one of the first who accepted the theory of Copernicus, and he successfully performed the labour of correcting the Gregorian calendar. He was, moreover, a good linguist, an earnest antiquary, and a diligent searcher of those records which tend to elucidate the history of the country, and to him is due the credit of first suggesting the formation of a “National Library,” for the preservation of those ancient writings in which lie “the treasures of all antiquity, and the everlasting seeds of continual excellency.” Paradoxical as it may seem, there was with the splendour and universality of his genius much childlike simplicity; and his credulous confiding nature often exposed him to the iniquitous arts of those about him; while his reckless extravagance, his love of ostentatious display, his debts, and his carelessness of the method which brought relief, kept him in continuous disquiet. He was part of the age in which he lived in that he was fond of alchemy, a believer in the divining-rod, and a devout practitioner of the astral science; but it is to be feared that his straitened circumstances sometimes prompted him to have recourse to tricks and artifices that his better judgment condemned. He was a strange mixture of pride and gentleness, of goodness and credulity. He discoursed learnedly with foreign philosophers, tended his little folks in their sicknesses, and soothed them in their childish griefs and sorrows; gazed into the glittering depths of his magic mirror and smiled good temperedly at his shrewish wife’s scoldings; dispensed his hospitalities and gossiped freely with the aristocratic personages who sought his society, and pawned his property to pay for their entertainment; contended with an archbishop and sought peace with the irrepressible Carter and his unruly associates; but we willingly forget the weaknesses and the foibles of the man when we remember the genius and the learning of the philosopher. With all his failings Dee possessed much kindness of heart, and though Manchester may not have been greatly advantaged by the ecclesiastical supervision of the “Wizard Warden,” he was yet, in many respects, much to be preferred to the needy Scotch courtier whom King James appointed as his successor.
BEESTON CASTLE.