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The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened by Kenelm Digby
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left to bring herself up, and to bestow her affections where she might. To
Kenelm's ardour she responded readily; and he philandered about her for a
year or two. But his mother would hear nothing of the match; and at
seventeen he was sent out on the grand tour, the object of which, we learn
from his _Memoirs_, was "to banish admiration, which for the most part
accompanieth home-bred minds, and is daughter of ignorance." Kenelm proved
better than the ideal set before him; and the more he travelled the more he
admired.

Into this tale of love and adventure I must break with the disturbing
intelligence that the handsome and romantic and spirited youth was in all
probability already procuring material for the compilation on _Physick and
Chirurgery_, which Hartman, his steward, published after his death. It was
not as a middle-aged _bon viveur_, nor as an elderly hypochondriac, that he
began his medical studies, but in the heyday of youth, and quite seriously,
too. The explanation brings with it light on some other of his interests as
well. When he set out on the grand tour, his head full of love and the
prospects of adventure, he found the spare energy to write from London to a
good friend of his, the Rev. Mr. Sandy, Parson of Great Lindford. In this
letter--the original is in the Ashmolean--Kenelm asks for the good parson's
prayers, and sends him "a manuscript of elections of divers good authors."
Mr. Longueville, who gives the letter, has strangely failed to identify
Sandy with the famous Richard Napier, parson, physician, and astrologer, of
the well-known family of Napier of Merchistoun. His father, Alexander
Napier, was often known as "Sandy"; and the son held the alternative names
also. Great Lindford is two and a half miles from Gothurst; and it is
possible that Protestant friends, perhaps Laud himself, urged on the good
parson the duty of looking after the young Catholic gentleman. Sandy
(Napier) was also probably his mother's medical adviser: he certainly acted
as such to some members of her family. A man of fervent piety--his "knees
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