found with the title of _Loose Fantasies_, and they were not printed till
1827.

It was quite a minor post in the Navy he received in recognition of
Scanderoon, and one wonders why he took it. Perhaps to gain experience, of
which he was always greedy. Or Scanderoon may have emptied his treasuries.
After the Restoration he had a hard struggle to get repaid for his ransom
of slaves on the Algerian coast. At any rate, as Naval Commissioner he
earned the reputation of a hard-working public servant.

If his constantly-changing life can be said to have had a turning-point, it
occurred in 1633, when his wife died suddenly. The death of the lovely
Venetia was the signal for a great outburst of vile poetry on her beauty
and merits. Ben Jonson, her loyal friend and Kenelm's, wrote several
elegies, one of them the worst. Vandyck painted her several times; and so
the memory of her loveliness is secure. As to her virtues, amiability
seems to have been of their number. "Unmatcht for beauty, chaster than the
ayre," wrote one poet. When they opened her head it was discovered she had
little brain; and gossip attributed the fact to her having drunk
viper-wine--by her husband's advice--for her complexion. This sounds absurd
only to those who have not perused the _Receipts in Physick and
Chirurgery_. Little brain or not, her husband praised her wits. Ben Jonson
wrote with devotion of her "who was my muse, and life of all I did."

Digby imitated his father-in-law who, in similar circumstances, gave
himself up to solitude and recollection. His place of retirement was
Gresham College. Do its present students remember it once housed a hermit
who "wore a long mourning cloake, a high crowned hat, his beard unshorne
... as signes of sorrowe for his beloved wife"? There "he diverted himself
with chymistry and the professor's good conversation." He had "a fair and