A MAGICIAN'S MIRROR AND BRACELET.
A strange blending of pure science and gross superstition is remarkably illustrated in the history of the celebrated Dr. Dee. Born in London in 1527, John Dee raised himself at an early age to a great reputation for his learning, in the mathematical sciences especially, in the most celebrated universities in his own country and of the continent. He is said to have imbibed a taste for the occult sciences while a student at Louvain, but there was evidently in his temper much of an enthusiastic and visionary turn, which must have given him a taste for such mysterious pursuits, without the necessity of an external impulse. One of the oldest and most generally credited of magical operations, was that of bringing spirits or visions into a glass or mirror, a practice which has continued to exist in the East even to the present day, and which prevailed to a very considerable extent in all parts of Western Europe during the sixteenth century. The process was not a direct one, for the magician did not himself see the vision in the mirror, but he had to depend upon an intermediate agent, a sort of familiar, who in England was known by the name of a skyrer, and whose business it was to look into the mirror and describe what he saw. Dr. Dee's principal skyrer was one Edward Kelly, and during his connexion with him, Dee kept an exact diary of all his visions, a portion of which was printed in a folio volume by Merio Casaubon in 1659. In this journal more than one magical mirror is evidently mentioned, and that which we here engrave is believed to have been of the number. It is now in the collection of Lord Londesborough.
It is a polished oval slab of black stone, of what kind we have not been able to ascertain, but evidently of a description which was not then common in Western Europe, and Dr. Dee, who died in 1608, may have considered it as extremely precious, and as only to be obtained by some extraordinary means. It was one of the ornaments of the museum of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill; and Walpole has attached to it a statement of its history in his own hand-writing, from which we learn that it was "long" in the possession of the Mordaunts, earls of Peterborough, in whose catalogue it was described as "the black stone into which Dr. Dee used to call his spirits." It passed from that collection to Lady Elizabeth Germaine, from whom it went to John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, whose son, Lord Frederick Campbell, presented it to Horace Walpole. This interesting relic was bought at the Strawberry Hill sale for the late Mr. Pigott; and at the more recent sale of that gentleman's collection, it passed into the hands of Lord Londesborough. Its history and authenticity appear, therefore, to be very well made out. The family of the Mordaunts held a prominent place in English history during the whole of the seventeenth century, and it is hardly probable that they would have received an object like this without having good reason for believing that its history was authentic. It is believed that Butler alluded to this identical stone in his well-known lines:—
"Kelly did all his feats upon
The devil's looking-glass or stone,
When, playing with him at bo-peep,
He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep."
Hudibras. Part II. Canto 3.