content--to please myself in looking back upon my past and sweet errors."
He even begs those who may come upon the MS. "to convert these blotted
sheets into a clear flame." His commentary on the _Faëry Queen_ stanza was
thrown off in a hurry. "The same Discourse I made upon it the first half
quarter of an hour that I saw it, I send you there, without having reduced
it to any better form, or added anything at all to it." And so for the
better-known and interesting _Observations on 'Religio Medici.'_ Browne
reproached him for his review of a pirated edition. Digby replied he had
never authorised its publication, written as it was in twenty-four hours,
which included his procuring and reading the book--a truly marvellous _tour
de force_; for the thing is still worth perusal. He was always the
improvisor--ready, brilliant, vivid, imperfect. He must give vent to the
ideas that came upon him in gusts. "The impressions which creatures make
upon me," he says, "are like boisterous winds." He fully recognised his own
limitations. "I pretend not to learning," he declares, with exaggerated
modesty. Amateur and improviser of genius, let us praise him as such. The
spacious, generous minds that can find room for all the ideas and culture
of an epoch are never numerous enough. There is no one like such amateurs
for bridging two ages; and Digby, with one hand in Lilly's and the other in
Bacon's, joins the mediæval to the modern world. Nor is a universal amateur
a genius who has squandered his powers; but a man exercising his many
talents in the only way possible to himself, and generally with much
entertainment and stimulus to others. It was Ben Jonson, too great a man to
be one of his detractors on this score, who wrote of him:

"He is built like some imperial room
For that[1] to dwell in, and be still at home.
His breast is a brave palace, a broad street,
Where all heroic ample thoughts do meet;
Where nature such a large survey hath ta'en