unfortunate Erles relapse into calamitie makes me beleeve that you are
enough troubled both with his misfortunes and my ladys troubles; and so
a discourse of this nature would be unseasonable. [And concludes the
letter with] But at this time this much is to much. I am sorrie to heare
of the new troubles ther, and pray for a good issue of them especiallie
for my ladys sake and her five litle ones. [The Countess of
Northumberland here referred to was the mother of Sir William Lower's
wife, who was Penelope Perrot, daughter of Sir John Perrot, who married
Lady Dorothy Devereux, sister of Essex, and for her second husband Henry
Percy the gth Earl of Northumberland. Lower died in 1615.]

This responsible trust gave Hariot a good house and home of his own at
Sion, with independence and an observatory. He had a library in his own
house, and seems to have been the Earl's librarian and book selector or
purchaser for the library of Sion House, as well as for the use of the
Earl in the Tower. The Earl was a great book-collector, as appears by
his payrolls. Books were carried from Sion to the Tower and back again,
probably not only for the Earl's own use, but for Raleigh's in his
History of the World. Many of these books, it is understood, are still
preserved at Petworth, then and subsequently one of the Earl's seats,
but now occupied by the Earl of Leconsfield.

To look back a little. Before either Raleigh or Henry Percy was shut up
in the Tower, we find one of Hariot's earliest and ablest mathematical
disciples, Nathaniel Torporley, a learned clergyman, writing in high
praise of him in his now rare mathematical book in Latin, entitled,'
Diclides Coelometricx,' or Universal Gates of Astronomy, containing all
the materials for calculation of the whole art in the moderate space of
two tables, on a new general and very easy system. By Nathaniel
Torporley, of Shropshire, in his philosophical retreat, printed in 1602.