But Hartman is not the only witness to Digby’s connoisseurship in the joint mysteries.  Better to my mind than even Hartman’s are the style and the spirit of Master May.  In 1660 appeared The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery ... approved by the fifty years experience and industry of Robert May, in his attendance on Several Persons of Honour.  It is dedicated to Lord Lumley, Lord Lovelace, Sir Wm. Paston, Sir Kenelme Digby, and Sir Frederick Cornwallis, “so well known to the Nation for their admired Hospitalities,” and generally to

                          “the race
    Of those that for the Gusto stand,
    Whose tables a whole Ark command
    Of Nature’s plentie.”

“He is an Alien, a meer Stranger in England that hath not been acquainted with your generous housekeeping; for my own part, my more particular Tyes of Service to you, my Honoured Lords, have built me up to the height of this experience.”  His preface is a heartrending cry of regret for the good old times before usurping Parliaments banished splendidly extravagant gentlemen across the seas, “those golden days of Peace and Hospitality, when you enjoy’d your own, so as to entertain and relieve others ... those golden days wherein were practised the Triumphs and Trophies of Cookery, then was Hospitality esteemed and Neighbourhood preserved, the Poor cherished and God honoured; then was Religion less talk’t on and more practis’t, then was Atheism and Schisme less in Fashion, and then did men strive to be good rather than to seem so.”  High-souled were the chefs of the seventeenth century!

The 1669 edition of The Closet Opened is evidently the first.  The interleaved example mentioned in the Catalogue of the Digby Library is of the same date.  Whoever prepared it for the press and wrote the egregious preface “To the Reader”—­Hartman, or as I think, another—­gave it the title; but it was a borrowed one.  Some years earlier, in 1655, had appeared The Queen’s Closet Opened, Incomparable Secrets which were presented unto the Queen by the most Experienced Persons of the Times, many wherof were had in Esteem when she pleased to descend to Private Recreation.  The Queen, of course, is Henrietta Maria, and chief among the “Experienced Persons” referred to was certainly her Chancellor, Digby.  Possibly he may even have suggested the printing of the collection.  Like titles are met with again and again. Nature’s Cabinet Opened, a medical work, was attributed to Browne, though he repudiated it.  Ruthven’s book I have already alluded to. The Queen-like Closet, a Rich Cabinet, by Hannah Wolly, came out in 1670.