that, "having no children, he was very willing his wife should bring him a Prince by Sir Kenelme, whom he imagined the just measure of perfection."

A first-rate swordsman, yet was he "not apt in the least to give offence." His strength was that of a giant. Bristol related that one day at Sherborne he took up "a midling man," chair and all, with one arm. But there was nothing of the swashbuckler about him, and his endless vitality was matched by his courtesy. True, he hustled a Pope; but he addressed the Short Parliament in such reverential terms as no Roundhead could have found. One who had been courtier, exile, naval commander, student, prisoner, and diplomatist, who had associated with all sorts of persons, from kings to alchemists and cooks, had learnt resourcefulness. But he was never too hard put to it perhaps, seeing that "if he had not fourpence, wherever he came he would find respect and credit." "No man knew better how to abound, and to be abased, and either was indifferent to him."

He had his detractors. One who plays so many parts incites envy and ridicule; and he laid himself particularly open to both. Fantasy was in the Digby blood; and that agility of mind and nerve that turns now here, now there, to satisfy an unquenchable curiosity, that exuberance of mental spirits that forces to rapid and continuous expression, has ever been suspect of the English mind. He was "highly caressed in France." To Evelyn Sir Kenelm was a "teller of strange things," and again the Diarist called him "an errant mountebank"—though Evelyn sought his society, and was grateful for its stimulus. Lady Fanshawe, who met him at Calais, at the Governor's table, says he "enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories than might be averred.... That was his infirmity, though otherwise a person of most excellent parts, Page xxxvii and a very fine bred gentleman." "A certain eccentricity and unsteadiness perhaps inseparable from a mind of such vanity," is Lodge's criticism. "The Pliny of our age for lying," quoth Stubbes. But Digby's extraordinary stories were by no means all false. He may have talked sometimes to épater le bourgeois; but his serious statements were often judged as were the wonders of evolution by country audiences in the seventies.

His offence was he must always be talking. His ideas he must share, expound, illustrate, whether or no they were ripe. It is the sign-manual of the sincere amateur. His books are probably but the lees of his conversation. He was not, in the first place, a literary person. His Memoirs are good reading for those with a touch of the fantastic in themselves; but the average literary critic will dub them rhodomontade. His scientific and controversial treatises, not at all unreadable, and full of strange old lore, survive as curiosities never to be reprinted. Nevertheless, his temper was distinctly scientific, and if his exact discoveries be limited to observing the effect of oxygen on plant-life, and his actual invention to a particular kind of glass bottle, yet he was an eager student and populariser of the work of Bacon, Galileo, and Harvey; and his laboratories were the nursing grounds of the new experimental philosophy.

With a distinctly rationalistic temper, he was yet a faithful, if independent, son of the Roman Church. He speaks sometimes as if he regarded the Church as the great storehouse of necessary authority for Page xxxviii the intellectually feeble; but he accepted the main dogmas himself, being satisfied of them by intuition and reason. Protestantism, he held, was not for the ordinary person, considering "the natural imbecility of man's wits and understandings." His piety was a thing apart, a matter of heredity perhaps, and of his poetic temperament. I have heard him called by that abused name, "mystic." He was nothing of the sort, and he said so in memorable words. As an act of devotion he translated the Adhering to God of Albertus Magnus. In the dedication to his mother he compares himself, as the translator of this mystic treatise, to certain travellers who "speak upon hearsay of countries they were never in." "The various course in the world that I have runne myself out of breath in, hath afforded me little means for solid recollection." Yet was he now and then upon the threshold. With streaks of the quack and adventurer in him, he gave out deep notes. Says Lloyd: "His soul [was] one of those few souls that understand themselves."

With an itch to use his pen as well as his tongue, he had none of the patience, the hankering after perfection of form, of the professional man of letters. His account of his Scanderoon exploit, a sea-log, a little written-up later, was perhaps not meant for publication. It did not see the light till 1868. His Memoirs were written, he says, "for my own recreation, and then continued and since preserved only for my own private content—to please myself in looking back upon my past and sweet errors." He even begs those who may come upon the MS. "to convert these blotted sheets into a clear flame." His commentary on the Faëry Queen stanza was thrown off in a hurry. "The same Discourse I made upon it the first half quarter of an hour that I saw it, I send you there, without having reduced it to any better form, or added anything at all to it." And so for the better-known and interesting Observations on 'Religio Medici.' Browne reproached him for his review of a pirated edition. Digby replied he had never authorised its publication, written as it was in twenty-four hours, which included his procuring and reading the book—a truly marvellous tour de force; for the thing is still worth perusal. He was always the improvisor—ready, brilliant, vivid, imperfect. He must give vent to the ideas that came upon him in gusts. "The impressions which creatures make upon me," he says, "are like boisterous winds." He fully recognised his own limitations. "I pretend not to learning," he declares, with exaggerated modesty. Amateur and improviser of genius, let us praise him as such. The spacious, generous minds that can find room for all the ideas and culture of an epoch are never numerous enough. There is no one like such amateurs for bridging two ages; and Digby, with one hand in Lilly's and the other in Bacon's, joins the mediæval to the modern world. Nor is a universal amateur a genius who has squandered his powers; but a man exercising his many talents in the only way possible to himself, and generally with much entertainment and stimulus to others. It was Ben Jonson, too great a man to be one of his detractors on this score, who wrote of him: