stay at my house." After his escape from The Clink, Fr. John Gerard concealed William Alabaster for two or three months in a London safe house and secret Catholic chapel overseen by Anne Line and Fr. Robert Drury. During that time, Fr. Gerard led Alabaster through a guided retreat based on The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola and Alabaster expressed a desire to enter the Jesuit Order. Fr. Gerard was reportedly very surprised and asked Alabaster to explain why he wished to join the Society, "when he knew, or should know, that it meant just the contrary of all he was used to." Alabaster's answer satisfied Fr. Gerard's concerns, and the latter arranged to smuggle the former Anglican clergyman to the Spanish Netherlands and gave him 300 florins towards his future expenses. In a subsequent interrogation on July 22, 1600, Alabaster admitted to receiving another £30 in Brussels and to having travelled to meet Fr. Robert Persons in Rome. In 1607 Alabaster published at Antwerp Apparatus in Revelationem Jesu Christi, in which he used his study of the Kabbalah to give a mystical interpretation to the Christian Bible. The book was placed on the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum early in 1610. He went to Rome and was imprisoned for a time by the Roman Inquisition, but succeeded in returning to England and again conformed to the Established Church of the Realm. After returning to England, Alabaster became a doctor of divinity at Cambridge University and chaplain to King James I. After his marriage in 1618 his life now became more settled and he devoted his later years to theological studies. He had an appreciable library, and books with his inscription can be found in numerous libraries today. Personal life In 1618 Alabaster married Katherine Fludd, a widow, and was linked by marriage to the celebrated physician and alchemist Robert Fludd. Death He died in 1640 after serving as Vicar of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, at Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire. Works Roxana is modelled on the tragedies of Seneca, and is a stiff and spiritless work. Fuller and Anthony à Wood bestowed exaggerated praise on it, while Samuel Johnson regarded it as the only Latin verse worthy of notice produced in England before Milton's elegies. Roxana is founded on the La Dalida (Venice, 1583) of Luigi Groto, known as Cieco di Hadria, and Hallam asserts that it is a plagiarism. A surreptitious edition