Occasionally he complains of her irritability, but it must be confessed that, with her domestic cares, the worry of her “mayds,” the sickness of her children, and the difficulty she had in getting from her mystical husband sufficient money for the needful expenses of her household, the poor woman had anxieties enough to try the most enduring patience and sour the sweetest temper. On one occasion he writes: “Jane most desperately angry in respect of her maydes;” at another time he puts up a prayer to the angels that she may be cured of some malady that so she may “be of a quieter mind, and not so testy and fretting as she hath been.” And again, “Katharin (a child under eight years) by a blow on the eare given by her mother did bled at the nose very much, which did stay for an howre and more; afterward she did walk into the town with nurse; upon her coming home she bled agayn.” Though Dee was much noticed and flattered by Elizabeth, the preferment she so often promised him was slow in coming; perhaps it was that the calculating Queen wished to ascertain the full value of his horoscope, which could be only done by the efflux of time, though, if the prosperity of her reign depended upon the day he had chosen for her coronation, she then had abundant proof of his magical skill. Dee was beginning to lose heart, his finances were getting low, he was in the usurer’s hands, and his pecuniary obligations were disquieting him. At this time came the crisis of his life. In 1581 he formed the disastrous friendship with Kelly, whom he took into his service as an assistant in his alchemical and astrological labours. This individual, whose dealings in the Black Art would fill a volume, was a crafty and unscrupulous schemer—a clever rogue, who, without a tithe of the learning or genius of Dee, contrived to work upon his credulity to such an extent that Dee believed him to have the power of seeing, hearing, and holding “conversations with spirituall creatures” that were invisible and inaudible to Dee himself. Kelly, who was nearly thirty years the junior of Dee, having been born in 1555, “left Oxford,” says Mr. John Eglinton Bailey, in his admirable notes to the reprint of Dee’s “Diary,” “abruptly to ramble in Lancashire,” and for some delinquencies, coining it is said, had his ears cut off at Lancaster. Mr. Bailey says that he had been a lawyer, and Lilly states on the authority of his sister that he had practised as an apothecary at Worcester. Of a restless, roving, and ambitious disposition, he was Everything by turns, and nothing long.