instincts, and his manner of the Great World.  But if he liked good cheer and a great way of living, he is never to be imagined as clinking cans with a “Hey for Cavaliers!  Ho for Cavaliers!” He never fought for the King’s cause—­though he fought a duel in Paris with a French lord who took Charles’s name in vain, and killed his man too.  His role was always the intellectual one.  He conspired for the cause—­chiefly, I think, out of personal friendship, and because he held it to be the cause of his Church.  He was not a virulent politician; and on the question of divine right the orthodox Cavaliers must have felt him to be very unsound indeed.

The era of Parliaments had now come, and Digby was to feel it.  He was summoned to the bar of the House as a Popish recusant.  Charles was ordered to banish him and Montague from his councils and his presence; and their examination continued at intervals till the middle of 1642.  The Queen interceded for Digby with much warmth, but she was a dangerous friend; and in the same year Montague and he were sent to prison.  I have heard a tradition that Crosby Hall was for a time his comfortable jail, but can find no corroboration of this.  The serjeant-at-arms confined him for a brief space at The Three Tuns, near Charing Cross, “where his conversation made the prison a place of delight” to his fellows.  Later, at Winchester House, Southwark, where he remained in honourable confinement for two years, he was busy with writing and experimenting—­to preserve him from “a languishing and rusting leisure.”  Two pamphlets, both of them hasty improvisations, one a philosophic commentary on a certain stanza of the Faerie Queen, the other, his well-known Observations on the ’Religio Medici’, are but mere bubbles of this seething activity, given over mostly to the preparation of his Two Treatises, “Of the Body,” and “Of the Soul,” published later in Paris, and to experiments on glass-making.

Many efforts were made for his release, the most efficacious by the Queen of France.  It should have been the Dowager Marie de Medicis, in memory of her hot flame for him when he was a youth; but though she may have initiated the appeal, she died before his release, which he seems to have owed to Anne of Austria’s good services.  Freedom meant banishment, but this sentence he did not take very seriously.  In these years he was continually going and coming between France and England, now warned by Parliament, now tolerated, now banished, again daring return, and escaping from the net.  “I can compare him to nothing but to a great fish that we catch and let go again; but still he will come to the bait,” said Selden of him in his Table-Talk.