The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened | Page 9

was healed. Digby declared that James and Buckingham were interested witnesses of the cure; and the king "drolled with him about it (which he could do with a very good grace)." He said he divulged the secret to the Duke of Mayenne. After the Duke's death his surgeon sold it so that "now there is scarce any country barber but knows it." Why did not Digby try it on his wounded men at Scanderoon? His Discourse to the learned assembly is a curious medley of subtle observation and old wives' tales, set out in sober, orderly, one might almost say scientific, fashion. Roughly, the substance of it may be summed up as "Like to like." The secret powder is a medium whereby the atoms in the bandage are drawn back to their proper place in the body! After Digby's death you could buy the powder at Hartman's shop for sixpence.
At the Restoration he returned to England. He was still Henrietta Maria's Chancellor. His relations with Cromwell had never broken their friendship; and probably he still made possets for her at Somerset House as he had done in the old days. But by Charles II there was no special favour shown him, beyond repayment for his ransom of English slaves during the Scanderoon voyage; and in 1664 he was forbidden the Court. The reason is not definitely known. Charles may have only gradually, but at last grimly, resented, the more he learnt of it, Digby's recognition of the usurper.
He found happiness in science, in books, in conversation, in medicine, stilling and cookery. In 1661 he had lectured at Gresham College on The Vegetation of Plants. When the Royal Society was inaugurated, in 1663, he was one of the Council. His house became a kind of academy, where wits, experimentalists, occultists, philosophers, and men of letters worked and talked. This was the house in Covent Garden. An earlier one is also noted by Aubrey. "The faire howses in Holbourne between King's Street and Southampton Street (which brake-off the continuance of them) were, about 1633, built by Sir Kenelme; where he lived before the civill warres. Since the restauration of Charles II he lived in the last faire house westward in the north portico of Covent Garden, where my lord Denzill Hollis lived since. He had a laboratory there." This latter house, which can be seen in its eighteenth-century guise in Hogarth's print of "Morning," in The Four Hours of the Day set, is now the quarters of the National Sporting Club. There he worked and talked and entertained, made his metheglin and _aqua vit?_ and other messes, till his last illness in 1665. Paris as ever attracted him; and in France were good doctors for his disease, the stone. He had himself borne on a litter to the coast; but feeling death's hand on him, he turned his face homeward again, and died in Covent Garden, June 11, 1665. In his will he desired to be buried by his beautiful Venetia in Christ Church, Newgate, and that no mention should be made of him on the tomb, where he had engraved four Latin inscriptions to her memory. But Ferrar wrote an epitaph for him:--
"Under this tomb the matchless Digby lies, Digby the great, the valiant, and the wise," etc.
The Great Fire destroyed the tomb, and scattered their ashes.
He had died poor; and his surviving son John, with whom he had been on bad terms, declared that all the property that came to him was his father's sumptuously compiled history of the Digby family. Apparently John regained some part of the estates later, which perhaps had only been left away from him to pay off debts. A great library of Sir Kenelm's was still in Paris; and after his death it was claimed by the French king, and sold for 10,000 crowns. His kinsman, the second Earl of Bristol, bought it, and joined it to his own; and the catalogue of the combined collection, sold in London in 1683, is an interesting and too little tapped source for Digby's mental history. Of his five children, three were already dead. Kenelm, his eldest son, had fallen at St. Neot's, in 1648, fighting for the King. It was his remaining son John who sanctioned the publication of his father's receipts.
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Sir Kenelm Digby has been recognised as the type of the great amateur, but always with a shaking of the head. Why this scorn of accomplished amateurs? Rather may their tribe increase, let us pray. Our world languisheth now for lack of them. He was fitted by nature to play the r?le superbly, to force his circumstances, never over pliant, to serve not his material interests, but his fame, his craving for universal knowledge and attainments. Says Wood: "His person was handsome