The most famous of all still-room books was that written by Sir Kenelm Digby, the friend of Kings and philosophers and himself a man of science, a doctor, an occultist, a privateer and a herbalist. Indeed it would be impossible to catalogue his activities, and he has always been recognised as the type _par excellence_ of the gifted amateur. Sir Kenelm was the elder son of the Digby who was one of the leaders in the Gunpowder Plot. Himself a man of European reputation, he numbered among his friends Bacon, Ben Jonson, Galileo, Descartes, Harvey and Cromwell. Queen Marie de' Medici was only one of many women who fell in love with him, but his one love was his wife, one of the most beautiful women of her day--Venetia Anastasia Stanley, immortalised by Van Dyck and Ben Jonson. Sir Kenelm Digby was the intimate friend of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, and after the Restoration he was a prominent figure at the Court of Charles II. When the Royal Society was inaugurated in 1663, he was one of the Council, and his house in Covent Garden was a centre where all the wits, occultists and men of letters forgathered. Aubrey tells us that after the Restoration he lived "in the last faire house westward in the north portico of Covent Garden where my lord Denzill Hollis lived since. He had a laboratory there."[133] One reads so much of the extravagances and excesses of Restoration days that it is all the pleasanter to remember the people of whom little has been written, the thousands of quiet folk who loved their homes and gardens and took delight in simple pleasures. It is of these people Sir Kenelm Digby's book reminds us, and even the names of his recipes are soothing reading--syllabubs, hydromel, mead, quidannies, tansies, slipp-coat-cheeses, manchets, and so forth. Moreover, there is no savour of the shop in these recipes, the book being full rather of flowers and herbs. It is also very leisurely, and in these days that, too, is soothing. Time we frequently find measured thus:--"Whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very slowly" or "about an Ave Maria while." It takes us back to a simple old world when great ladies not only looked well to the ways of their households, but attended themselves to the more important domestic matters. Sir Kenelm collected these recipes assiduously from his friends, and each housekeeper's pride in her speciality is very evident. To mention only a few of these, we find:--"Scotch Ale from my Lady Holmeby," "A very pleasant drink of Apples," "Master Webb's Ale and Bragot," "Apples in Gelly," "To make Bisket," "Sir Paul Neal's way of making Cider," "My Lord of St. Alban's Cresme Fouettee," "The Queen's Barley Cream," "To pickle capons my Lady Portland's way," "Pickled Champignons," "A Flomery-Caudle," "My Lord Hollis Hydromel," "Master Corsellises Antwerp Meath," "My own considerations for making of Meathe," "Meathe from the Muscovian Ambassadors Steward," "White Metheglin of my Lady