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 mediaeval 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: 

    “He is built like some imperial room
    For that[1] to dwell in, and be still at home. 
    His breast is a brave palace, a broad street,
    Where all heroic ample thoughts do meet;
    Where nature such a large survey hath ta’en
    As other souls to his, dwelt in a lane.”

[Footnote 1:  All virtue.]

There was nothing singular in his interest in astrology and alchemy.  Lilly and Booker, both of them among his acquaintances, were ordered to attend the parliamentary army at the siege of Colchester, “to encourage the soldiers with predictions of speedy victory.”  Still—­though he believed in greater absurdities—­his attitude towards such matters was that of his chosen motto, Vacate et Videte. “To rely too far upon that vaine art I judge to be rather folly than impiety.”  As with regard to spirits and witches, he says, “I only reserve my assent.”  That he was not altogether absorbed in the transmutation of metals in his laboratory practice, and yet that he dabbled in it, makes him historically interesting.  In him better than in Newton do we realise the temper of the early members of the Royal Society.  In this tale of his other activities I have not forgotten The Closet Opened.  Of all Digby’s many interests the most constant and permanent was medicine.  How to enlarge the span of man’s life was a problem much meditated on in his age.  We have seen how Descartes’s mind ran on it; and in Bacon’s Natural History there is reference to a ’book of the prolongation of life.’  In spite of what is written on his Janssen hermit portrait—­Saber morir la mayor hazanza—­Digby loved life.  His whole exuberant career is a paean to life, for itself and its great chances, and because “it giveth the leave to vent and boyle away the unquietnesses and turbulences that follow our passions.”  To prolong life, fortify it, clarify it, was a noble pursuit, and he set out on it as a youth under the tuition of the ’good parson of Lindford.  His Physick and Chirurgery receipts, published by Hartman, are many of them incredible absurdities, not unfrequently repulsive; but when we compare them with other like books of the time, they fit into a natural and not too fantastic place.  Sir Thomas Browne was laughing at Digby, but not at Digby alone, in the passage in Vulgar Errors—­“when for our warts we rub our hands before the moon, or commit any maculated part unto the touch of the dead.”  Sir Kenelm gathered his receipts on all his roads