Education had then made little progress, and the men of Lancashire, though the merriest of Englishmen, were as ignorant and superstitious as they were merry. Nowhere was the belief in supernatural agency more rife than in the Palatinate. The shaping power of the imagination had clothed every secluded clough and dingle with the weird drapery of superstition, and made every ruined or solitary tenement the abode of unhallowed beings, who were supposed to hold their diabolical revelries within it. The doctrines of necromancy and witchcraft were in common belief, and it is doubtful if there was a single man in the county who did not place the most implicit faith in both. Hence, Queen Elizabeth, if it was not that she wished to get rid of a troublesome suitor, may have thought there was a fitness of things in preferring a professor of the Black Art to the wardenship of Manchester; believing, possibly, that one given to astrology, and such like practices, could not find a more congenial home than in a county specially prone, as Lancashire then was, to indulge in _diablerie_ and the practice of alchemy and enchantment. A brief reference to the earlier career of Dr. Dee may not be altogether uninteresting. According to the genealogy drawn up by himself, he belonged to the line of Roderick the Great, Prince of Wales. His father, Rowland Dee, who was descended from a family settled in Radnorshire, carried on the business of a vintner in London; and there, or rather at Mortlake, within a few miles of the city, on the 13th July, 1527, the future warden first saw the light. After receiving a preliminary education at one or two of the city schools, and subsequently at the Grammar School of Chelmsford, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, being then only fifteen years of age; and during the five years he remained there he maintained, with unflinching strictness, the rule “only to sleepe four houres every night; to allow to meate and drink (and some refreshing after), two houres every day; and,” he adds, “of the other eighteen houres, all (except the tyme of going to and being at divine service) was spent in my studies and learning.” On leaving the University he passed some time in the Low Countries, his object being “to speake and conferr with some learned men, and chiefly mathematicians.” He made the acquaintance of Frisius, Mercator, Antonius Gogara, and other celebrated Flemings; and on his return to England he was chosen to be a Fellow of King Henry’s newly-erected College of Trinity, and made under-reader of the Greek tongue. His reputation stood very high, and his mathematical and astronomical pursuits, in which he was assisted by some rare and curious instruments—among them, as we are told, an “astronomer’s staff of brass, that was made of Gemma Frisius’ divising; the two great globes of Gerardus Mercator’s making; and the astronomer’s ring of brass, as Gemma Frisius had newly framed it,” which he had brought