So when, in a seventeenth-century bookseller's advertisement, I lighted on
a reference to the curious compilation of receipts entitled _The Closet of
Sir Kenelm Digby Opened_, having the usual idea of him as a great
gentleman, romantic Royalist, and somewhat out-of-date philosopher, I was
enough astonished at seeing his name attached to what seemed to me, in my
ignorance, outside even his wide fields of interest, to hunt for the book
without delay, examine its contents, and inquire as to its authenticity. Of
course I found it was not unknown. Though the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ omits any reference to it, and its name does not occur in Mr.
Carew Hazlitt's _Old Cookery Books_, Dr. Murray quotes it in his great
Dictionary, and it is mentioned and discussed in _The Life of Digby by One
of his Descendants_. But Mr. Longueville treats it therein with too scant
deference. One of a large and interesting series of contemporary books of
the kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with
confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners.
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