He had his detractors. One who plays so many parts incites envy and
ridicule; and he laid himself particularly open to both. Fantasy was in the
Digby blood; and that agility of mind and nerve that turns now here, now
there, to satisfy an unquenchable curiosity, that exuberance of mental
spirits that forces to rapid and continuous expression, has ever been
suspect of the English mind. He was "highly caressed in France." To Evelyn
Sir Kenelm was a "teller of strange things," and again the Diarist called
him "an errant mountebank"--though Evelyn sought his society, and was
grateful for its stimulus. Lady Fanshawe, who met him at Calais, at the
Governor's table, says he "enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories
than might be averred.... That was his infirmity, though otherwise a person
of most excellent parts, and a very fine bred gentleman." "A certain
eccentricity and unsteadiness perhaps inseparable from a mind of such
vanity," is Lodge's criticism. "The Pliny of our age for lying," quoth
Stubbes. But Digby's extraordinary stories were by no means all false. He
may have talked sometimes to _épater le bourgeois;_ but his serious
statements were often judged as were the wonders of evolution by country
audiences in the seventies.

His offence was he must always be talking. His ideas he must share,
expound, illustrate, whether or no they were ripe. It is the sign-manual of
the sincere amateur. His books are probably but the lees of his
conversation. He was not, in the first place, a literary person. His
_Memoirs_ are good reading for those with a touch of the fantastic in
themselves; but the average literary critic will dub them rhodomontade. His
scientific and controversial treatises, not at all unreadable, and full of
strange old lore, survive as curiosities never to be reprinted.
Nevertheless, his temper was distinctly scientific, and if his exact
discoveries be limited to observing the effect of oxygen on plant-life, and