"The Pliny of our age for lying," quoth
Stubbes. But Digby's extraordinary stories were by no means all false. He
may have talked sometimes to _epater le bourgeois;_ but his serious
statements were often judged as were the wonders of evolution by country
audiences in the seventies.
His offence was he must always be talking. His ideas he must share,
expound, illustrate, whether or no they were ripe. It is the sign-manual of
the sincere amateur. His books are probably but the lees of his
conversation. He was not, in the first place, a literary person. His
_Memoirs_ are good reading for those with a touch of the fantastic in
themselves; but the average literary critic will dub them rhodomontade. His
scientific and controversial treatises, not at all unreadable, and full of
strange old lore, survive as curiosities never to be reprinted.
Nevertheless, his temper was distinctly scientific, and if his exact
discoveries be limited to observing the effect of oxygen on plant-life, and
his actual invention to a particular kind of glass bottle, yet he was an
eager student and populariser of the work of Bacon, Galileo, and Harvey;
and his laboratories were the nursing grounds of the new experimental
philosophy.
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