It is not easy to imagine a state of greater degradation than that
into which this person had now fallen. During all the prime and vigour
of his intellect, he had sustained an eminent part among the learned
and the great, distinguished and honoured by Elizabeth and her
favourite. But his unbounded arrogance and self-opinion could never be
satisfied. And seduced, partly by his own weakness, and partly by the
insinuations of a crafty adventurer, he became a mystic of the most
dishonourable sort. He was induced to believe in a series of
miraculous communications without common sense, engaged in the pursuit
of the philosopher's stone, and no doubt imagined that he was
possessed of the great secret. Stirred up by these conceptions, he
left his native country, and became a wanderer, preying upon the
credulity of one prince and eminent man after another, and no sooner
was he discarded by one victim of credulity, than he sought another,
a vagabond on the earth, reduced from time to time to the greatest
distress, persecuted, dishonoured and despised by every party in their
turn. At length by incessant degrees he became dead to all moral
distinctions, and all sense of honour and self-respect. "Professing
himself to be wise he became a fool, walked in the vanity of his
imagination," and had his understanding under total eclipse. The
immoral system of conduct in which he engaged, and the strange and
shocking blasphemy that he mixed with it, render him at this time a
sort of character that it is painful to contemplate.

Led on as Dee at this time was by the ascendancy and consummate art of
Kelly, there was far from existing any genuine harmony between them;
and, after many squabbles and heart-burnings, they appear finally to
have parted in January 1589, Dee having, according to his own account,
at that time delivered up to Kelly, the elixir and the different
implements by which the transmutation of metals was to be effected.