ine,
stilling and cookery. In 1661 he had lectured at Gresham College on _The
Vegetation of Plants_. When the Royal Society was inaugurated, in 1663, he
was one of the Council. His house became a kind of academy, where wits,
experimentalists, occultists, philosophers, and men of letters worked and
talked. This was the house in Covent Garden. An earlier one is also noted
by Aubrey. "The faire howses in Holbourne between King's Street and
Southampton Street (which brake-off the continuance of them) were, about
1633, built by Sir Kenelme; where he lived before the civill warres. Since
the restauration of Charles II he lived in the last faire house westward in
the north portico of Covent Garden, where my lord Denzill Hollis lived
since. He had a laboratory there." This latter house, which can be seen in
its eighteenth-century guise in Hogarth's print of "Morning," in _The Four
Hours of the Day_ set, is now the quarters of the National Sporting Club.
There he worked and talked and entertained, made his metheglin and _aqua
vitae_ and other messes, till his last illness in 1665. Paris as ever
attracted him; and in France were good doctors for his disease, the stone.
He had himself borne on a litter to the coast; but feeling death's hand on
him, he turned his face homeward again, and died in Covent Garden, June 11,
1665. In his will he desired to be buried by his beautiful Venetia in
Christ Church, Newgate, and that no mention should be made of him on the
tomb, where he had engraved four Latin inscriptions to her memory. But
Ferrar wrote an epitaph for him:--

"Under this tomb the matchless Digby lies,
Digby the great, the valiant, and the wise," etc.

The Great Fire destroyed the tomb, and scattered their ashes.

He had died poor; and his surviving son John, with whom he had been on bad
terms, declared that all the property that came to him was his father's
sumptuously compiled history of the Digby family. Apparently John regained
some part of the estates later, which perhaps had only been left away from
him to pay off debts. A great library of Sir Kenelm's was still in Paris;
and after his death it was claimed by the French king, and sold for 10,000
crowns. His kinsman, the second Earl of Bristol, bought it, and joined it
to his own; and the catalogue of the combined collection, sold in London in
1683, is an interesting and too little tapped source for Digby's mental
history. Of his five children, three were already