The era of Parliaments had now come, and Digby was to feel it. He was
summoned to the bar of the House as a Popish recusant. Charles was ordered
to banish him and Montague from his councils and his presence; and their
examination continued at intervals till the middle of 1642. The Queen
interceded for Digby with much warmth, but she was a dangerous friend; and
in the same year Montague and he were sent to prison. I have heard a
tradition that Crosby Hall was for a time his comfortable jail, but can
find no corroboration of this. The serjeant-at-arms confined him for a
brief space at The Three Tuns, near Charing Cross, "where his conversation
made the prison a place of delight" to his fellows. Later, at Winchester
House, Southwark, where he remained in honourable confinement for two
years, he was busy with writing and experimenting--to preserve him from "a
languishing and rusting leisure." Two pamphlets, both of them hasty
improvisations, one a philosophic commentary on a certain stanza of the
_Faerie Queen_, the other, his well-known _Observations on the 'Religio
Medici'_, are but mere bubbles of this seething activity, given over mostly
to the preparation of his _Two Treatises_, "Of the Body," and "Of the
Soul," published later in Paris, and to experiments on glass-making.
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