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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