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, 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 epater 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.