’He was the most saturnine man my eyes ever beheld either before I practised (astrology) or since:  of middle stature, broad forehead, beetle browed, thick shoulders, flat nosed, full lips, down looked, black, curling, stiff hair, splay footed;’ ’much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome; seldom without a black eye, or one mischief or another.’  A very good description this, save that the shoulders of it are between the brow and nose:  not a handsome man, certainly; a kind of white negro, we should say, and not the better for being white:  nevertheless men of high rank came to see him, and readers who have made acquaintance with Sir Kenelm Digby will not be astonished to learn that he was one of them.  He came with Lord Bothwell, and ’desired Evans to show them a spirit.’  But ’after some time of invocation, Evans was taken out of the room, and carried into the fields near Battersea causeway, close to the Thames:’  taken by the spirits, because the magician ’had not at the time of invocation made any suffumigation;’ for spirits must always be treated gingerly.  ’Sir Kenelm Digby and Lord Bothwell went home without any harm;’ which was better than they deserved.

Lilly, after many lessons given him by this Evans, was doubtful about the black art, as he might well be; but, he says, ’being now very meanly introduced, I applied myself to study those books I had obtained, many times twelve or fifteen or eighteen hours a day and night:  I was curious to discover whether there was any verity in the art or not.  Astrology at this time, viz. 1633, was very rare in London; few professing it that understood anything thereof.’  Lilly gives us next some account of the astrologers of his time; but the reader need form no further acquaintance of this kind; acquaintance with Lilly, who was the best of them, will be enough for him.

In October of this year, 1633, Lilly’s wife died, and left him ’very near to the value of one thousand pounds sterling’—­all she had to leave.  He continued a widower ‘a whole year,’ which he, as that phrase implies, held to be a long time in such bereavement—­and followed his studies in astrology very diligently.  So diligently that he soon had knowledge to impart to others, and he ’taught Sir George Knight astrology, that part which concerns sickness, wherein he so profited that in two or three months he would give a very good discovery of any disease only by his figures.’

With a new wife, which he got the next year (1634), Lilly had L500 portion; but ‘she was of the nature of Mars,’ which is surely not a good nature in a wife.  In that same year he, with some ‘other gentlemen,’ engaged in an adventure for hidden treasure:  they ’played the hazel rod round about the cloyster,’ and digged, in the place indicated, six feet deep, till they came to a coffin; but they did not open it, for which they were afterward regretful, thinking that it probably contained the treasure.  Suddenly, while they