182 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



a herbalist. Indeed it would be impossible to catalogue his 

 activities, and he has always been recognised as the type par 

 excellence of the gifted amateur. Sir Kenelm was the elder son 

 of the Digby who was one of the leaders in the Gunpowder 

 Plot. Himself a man of European reputation, he numbered 

 among his friends Bacon, Ben Jonson, Galileo, Descartes, 

 Harvey and Cromwell. Queen Marie de' Medici was only one 

 of many women who fell in love with him, but his one love was 

 his wife, one of the most beautiful women of her day Venetia 

 Anastasia Stanley, immortalised by Van Dyck and Ben Jonson. 

 Sir Kenelm Digby was the intimate friend of Charles I. and 

 Henrietta Maria, and after the Restoration he was a prominent 

 figure at the Court of Charles II. When the Royal Society 

 was inaugurated in 1663, he was one of the Council, and his 

 house in Covent Garden was a centre where all the wits, occultists 

 and men of letters forgathered. Aubrey tells us that after the 

 Restoration 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." 1 One reads so much of 

 the extravagances and excesses of Restoration days that it is 

 all the pleasanter to remember the people of whom little has 

 been written, the thousands of quiet folk who loved their homes 

 and gardens and took delight in simple pleasures. It is of 

 these people Sir Kenelm Digby's book reminds us, and even the 

 names of his recipes are soothing reading syllabubs, hydromel, 

 mead, quidannies, tansies, slipp-coat-cheeses, manchets, and so 

 forth. Moreover, there is no savour of the shop in these 

 recipes, the book being full rather of flowers and herbs. It is 

 also very leisurely, and in these days that, too, is soothing. 

 Time we frequently find measured thus : " Whiles you can 

 say the Miserere Psalm very slowly " or " about an Ave Maria 

 while." It takes us back to a simple old world when great 

 ladies not only looked well to the ways of their households, but 

 attended themselves to the more important domestic matters. 

 1 This house is to be seen in Hogarth's " Morning." 



