Peter Ackroyd - The house of Doctor Dee

For the past twenty years or more I have walked among the draymen and the car-men, the merchants and the idle people, the rakehells and the porters; I know the cassocks and the ruffs, the caps and the periwigs; I know the hospitals for the poor and the fair churches for the rich. I know the wards of Portsoken and Downegate, where there are many murders; of Langborne and Billingsgate, where those commonly known as jarkmen and courtesy-men are to be found; of Candlewick Street and Walbroke, which are notorious for suicides; of Vintry and Cordwainer, where there are crimes not to be mentioned. I know Ratcliffe, Limehouse, Whitechapel, St Katherine, Stretford, Hogston, Sordycke and all those sad regions beyond the walls. It was in Thames Street I met a female, in Tower Street that I courted her, and in St Dunstan that I married her. In Crutched Friars I buried my still-born children, two male and one female, and beyond the postern gate in the Minories I laid my brothers in the earth.

Yet within this city of death I hear again the cries for Cherries ripe, apples fine, for Fine Seville oranges and Ripe hartychokes, for scarves and rushes and kindling wood. I know where to find a pair of gloves or a pair of spectacles, a painter's easel or a barber's comb, a trumpet or a close-stool. I know such places of common assembly as the ordinaries and the gaming-houses, the cockpits and the bowling alleys. I know the haberdashers of London Bridge and the goldsmiths of West Cheap, the grocers of Bucklersbury and the drapers of Watling Street, the hosiers of Cordwainer Street and the shoemakers of London Wall, the skinners of Walbroke and the ironmongers of Old Jewry. Wherewithall there rises such a noise of tumbrils and carts, such a thundering of coaches and chariots, with hammers beating in one place and tubs being hooped in another, with men and women and children in such shoals, that I might be in the belly of the monster Leviathan. Yet it was here, even here, that I conducted my studies philosophical and experimental; among the clamour, and almost in the very midst of the stinking crowd, I searched within the bright glass of nature and found the exhalations of the spiritus mundi.

I am now removed to a house in Clerkenwell with my wife and household, and have been these last fifteen years (my father, being feeble and frail to the last degree, is lodged within a charity). It is in a place of healthfulness, close by Clerkenwell Green and to the side of Turnmill Street where the clerks' well is still to be found; my garden at the back slopes downward to the Fleet and to the north are the fields of Hockley where the archers shoot at their targets. But it is an ancient, rambling pile, and would require another Minos to trace its regions, with its bedchambers and byrooms and passages and parlours and other rooms severally partitioned. Here I sit in my library, on the upper storey, with my papers scattered around me. For this is the room in which all my labours and pains have been bestowed to win glory for my native country, and where I have pored over diverse manuscripts and pamphlets and other printed matter. Close beside this chamber, across the upper landing, is my laboratory with all the necessary vessels, some of earth, some of metal, some of glass, and some of mixed stuff; here are my retorts and receivers for the purposes of pyrotechnia, so that the walls and ceiling are now heavily smoked by my fiery studies. I have a little partition wall here also, beyond which is my storehouse replenished with chemical stuff and such curiosities as may advance my art, viz. one great bladder with about four pounds' weight of a very sweet substance like a brownish gum. Here, too, are bags containing certain powders together with leaden caskets holding glasses of liquid for the greater service and profit of my studies. There is also a transparent tube here, to be mightily covered by earth and dung. Of which nothing more may be revealed at this time.

Yet there are few things in this house, few things in this kingdom, that can compare with my library. Here are my globes of Gerardus Mercator's best making — though with my own hand I have set down upon them certain reformations both geographical and celestial, such as the places and motions of several comets that I have observed. Here also is my hour-glass to measure the time of my studies justly, and the universal astrolabe new minted by Thomas Hill in Cheapside. But my true glory lies within my books: printed or anciently written, bound or unbound, there are near four thousand of them. Some are in Greek, some in Latin, some in our native tongue, and yet all found by me, yes, found and gathered even when I was ready to die by false accusation of magic in Queen Mary's reign. Some of these hardly gotten monuments were taken in a manner out of the dunghill, since they were found by me in the corner of despoiled churches or monasteries where they were close to ruin from rotting away. Some came from a great case or frame of boxes which I took up from the decayed library of an ancient house (still lying desolate and waste at this very hour, beyond Pinner): each had their peculiar titles noted on the forepart of the boxes with chalk only, yet at the sight of them my heart leapt up. I knew them to contain hundreds of very rare evidences, which now I keep here in stalls and presses or locked within great barred chests. For their exact copying, and for my own writings, I need a plentiful supply of pens and inks; so here, at my left hand, are quills of all sorts. When the ink runs down the hollow trunk of my pen, then on this writing-table, with all my notes scattered about me, I begin to chronicle marvels.

But I need not tell you that there are also marvels within my books — among them wonderful and rare works by Zoroaster, Orpheus, and Hermes Trismegistus, as well as the sheets of old ephemerides. This room has become a very university or academy for scholars of diverse sorts, and there are such writings here as are above price, viz. Reuchlin his De verbo mirifico and De arte cabalistica, Brunschwick's Book of Distillation, The New Pearl of Great Worth set forth by Petrus Bonus of Pola but newly edited by Janus Lacinius, Cornelius Agrippa his renowned De occultia philosophia, De incantationibus by Pomponazzi, the Corpus Hermeticum collected by Turnebus as well as Clavicula Solomonis and The Sun of Perfection, which are both very useful and pleasant to read. Nor can I forget that most precious jewel of other men's labours which I have yet recovered, Trithemius his Steganographia. Neither will I omit the wonderful and divine sciences which are published forth by Paracelsus himself, or the connections therewithal to be traced through De harmonia mundi of Francesco Giorgi, De institutione musicae of Boethius, and Paciolus his De divina proportione. These are not to be found for money at any market or in any stationer's shop, since in truth they are works for secret study.

Among these bound volumes lie fair copies of my own writings which, for the everlasting memory of men, are marked with my London seal of Hermes. I have not spent these many years in composing riddles or merry tales, but have rather thought continually of the generations yet to come. And just as the levels of the cosmos are to be known as elemental, intellectual and celestial, so have I placed my own works in varying degrees of art: from those which are suited to the best understanding of mechanics, such as The Elements of Geometry and Mathematical Preface (here I include General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, together with sundry volumes in horology, perspective, geometry and other arts), to those which are framed for the comprehension of the wise, such as my Propodeumata Aphoristica, leading ever upwards to those most excellent and valuable studies which I keep here beside me and are known only as Liber Mysteriorum. The scope of my enterprise is so great that, as to this time, it has never to my knowledge by any been achieved; that is why I must keep my papers in closed chests within my study, away from the eyes or tongues of vulgar sophisters. It is hard in these our dreary days to win any due or common credit for work in rare arts: so, since I can in no way rely upon the testimony of my countrymen, I join myself here with my ancestors and place my own work beside theirs. When I consider the rash, lewd, fond and most untrue fables conceived of me and my philosophical studies, I find my refuge from bleating tongues here in my library where all the ages lie silently before me. It is my quietus est, my pass-port (as they say) to freedom. Where is liberty to be found but in the memory and the contemplation of the past?