Dee (Dr. John)

A man of vast knowledge, whose library, museum, and mathematical instruments were valued at £2,000. On one occasion the populace broke into his house and destroyed the greater part of his valuable collection, under the notion that Dee held intercourse with the devil. He ultimately died a pauper, at the advanced age of eighty-one, and was buried at Mortlake. He professed to be able to raise the dead, and had a magic mirror, afterwards in Horace Walpole’s collection at Strawberry Hill (1527–1608).

Dee’s speculum or mirror, in which persons were told they could see their friends in distant lands and how they were occupied. It is a piece of solid pink-tinted glass about the size of an orange. It is now in the British Museum.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.