As for the poetry I promised—­well, I have been quoting it, have I not?  But there is more, and better.  Surely it was a romantic folk that kept in its store-rooms the “best Blew raisins of the sun,” or “plumpsome raisins of the sun,” and made its mead with dew, and eagerly exchanged with each other recipes for “Conserve of Red Roses.”  And now we come to an essential feature of the whole.  It is a cuisine that does not reek of shops and co-operative stores, but of the wood, the garden, the field and meadow.  Like Culpeper’s pharmacopeia, it is made for the most part of “Such Things only as grow in England, they being most fit for English Bodies.”  Is it any wonder that the metheglin should be called the “Liquor of Life,” which has these among its ingredients:  Bugloss, borage, hyssop, organ, sweet-marjoram, rosemary, French cowslip, coltsfoot, thyme, burnet, self-heal, sanicle, betony, blew-button, harts-tongue, meadowsweet, liverwort, bistort, St. John’s wort, yellow saunders, balm, bugle, agrimony, tormentilla, comfrey, fennel, clown’s allheal, maidenhair, wall-rue, spleen-wort, sweet oak, Paul’s betony, and mouse-ear?

The housewife of to-day buys unrecognisable dried herbs in packets or bottles.  In those days she gathered them in their season out of doors.  The companions to The Closet Opened should be the hasty and entertaining Culpeper, the genial Gerard, and Coles of the delightful Adam in Eden, all the old herbals that were on Digby’s bookshelves, so full of absurdities, so full of pretty wisdom.  They will tell you how to mix in your liquor eglantine for coolness, borage, rosemary, and sweet-marjoram for vigour, and by which planet each herb or flower is governed.  Has our sentiment for the flowers of the field increased now we no longer drink their essence, or use them in our dishes?  I doubt it.  It is surely a pardonable grossness that we should desire the sweet fresh things to become part of us—­like children, who do indeed love flowers, and eat them.  In the Appendix I have transcribed a list of the plants referred to.  Most cooks would be unable to tell one from another; and even modern herbalists have let many fall out of use, while only a few are on the lists of the English pharmacopeia.  To go simpling once more by field and wood and hedgerow would be a pleasant duty for country housewives to impose upon themselves; and as to the herbalists’ observations on their virtues, we may say with old Coles, “Most of them I am confident are true, and if there be any that are not so, yet they are pleasant.”

There is an air of flippancy about that reflexion of Coles you will never find in Sir Kenelm.  Of the virtues of each plant and flower he used he was fully convinced; and when he tells of their powers, as in his “Aqua Mirabilis,” the tale is like a solemn litany, and we are reminded of Clarendon’s testimony to “the gravity of his motion.”  And so, his Closet once more open, he stands at the door, his majesty not greatly lessened; for the book contains a reminiscence of his rolling eloquence, something of his romance, and not a little of his poetry.