Of the two books, the Queen’s and her Chancellor’s, Digby’s has afforded me by far the most delight.  Though many of the receipts are evidently given as sent in, the stamp of his personality is on the whole; and he is the poet of all these culinary artists.  But on the score of usefulness to the housewife I forbear all judgment.  The recipes may be thought extravagant in these late hard times—­though epicurism has changed rather than vanished.  Lord Bacon’s receipt for making “Manus Christi for the Stomach” begins, “Take of the best pearls very finely pulverised one drachm”; and a health resolution runs, “To take once during supper wine in which gold is quenched.”  Costly ingredients such as pearls and leaf gold appear only once among Digby’s receipts.  The modern housewife may be aghast at the thought of more than a hundred ways of making mead and metheglin.  Mead recalls to her perhaps her first history-book, wherein she learnt of it as a drink of the primitive Anglo-Saxons.  If she doubt the usefulness of the collection in her own kitchen, let her take the little volume to her boudoir, and read it there as gossiping notes of the beau monde in the days when James I and the Charleses ruled the land.  She will find herself in lofty company, and on intimate terms with them.  They come down to our level, without any show of condescension.  Lords and ladies who were personages of a solemn state pageant, are now human neighbourly creatures, owning to likes and dislikes, and letting us into the secrets of their daily habits.

It pleases me to think of Henrietta Maria, in her exile, busying herself in her still-room, and forgetting her dangers and sorrows in simpling and stilling and kitchen messes; and of her devoted Sir Kenelm, in the moments when he is neither abeting her Royalist plots, nor diverting her mind to matters of high science, or the mysteries of the Faith, but bringing to her such lowlier consolations as are hinted in “Hydromel as I made it weak for the Queen Mother.”  We are not waiting in a chill ante-chamber when we read, “The Queen’s ordinary Bouillon de Sante in a morning was thus,” or of the Pressis which she “used to take at nights—­of great yet temperate nourishment—­instead of a Supper.”  And who can hint at Court scandals in the face of such evidence of domesticity as “The Queen useth to baste meat with yolks of fresh eggs, &c.” or “The way that the Countess de Penalva makes the Portuguese eggs for the Queen is this”?  We cannot help being interested in the habits of Lady Hungerford, who “useth to make her mead at the end of summer, when she takes up her Honey, and begins to drink it in Lent.”  My Lady Gower and her husband were of independent tastes.  Each had their own receipts.  It must be remembered that Dr. Johnson said no woman could write a cookery-book; and he threatened to write one himself.  And Sir Kenelm had many serious rivals among his own sex.