In 1842, Halliwell-Phillipps edited for the Camden Society a volume entitled The Diary of Dr. John Dee. To the diary itself, which extends with considerable gaps over the years (1554) 1577 to 1601, was appended the catalogue of Dee’s manuscript library, taken from an autograph MS., in the Gale Collection at Trinity College, Cambridge. Dee was not merely an alchemist and spiritualist, but a really learned man, and one who had done his best, by petitions and otherwise, to stimulate interest in the rescuing of manuscripts from the dissolved monastic libraries and to induce the sovereign to establish a central national collection of them.