The monument in Potomac Park was dedicated at sunset. After that the committee on Savoir Faire, observing the wilted collar of the Unknown Citizen, thought it the truest courtesy to let him escape. We ourself managed to follow him through the crowds. He and his wife looked nervously over their shoulders now and then, but they had shaken off pursuit. At a little stationery store they bought some postcards. Then they went to the movies.
SIR KENELM DIGBY
Sir Kenelm Digby, of whose acquaintance all his contemporaries seem to have been ambitious.
—Dr. Johnson, Life of Cowley.
Prohibition, I dare say, is going to make fashionable the private compilation of just such delightful works as The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened; London, at the Star in Little Britain, 1669. Sir Kenelm, “the friend of kings and the special friend of queens,” crony of such diverse spirits as Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Oliver Cromwell, kept this notebook of his jocund experiments in home brewing and cookery. Just as nowadays a man will jot down the formula of some friend’s shining success in the matter of domestic chianti, so did the admirable Kenelm record “Sir Thomas Gower’s Metheglin for Health,” or “My Lord Hollis’ Hydromel,” or “Sir John Colladon’s Oat-Meal Pap,” or “My Lady Diana Porter’s Scotch Collops;” and adding, of course, his own particular triumphs—e. g., “Hydromel as I Made it Weak for the Queen Mother,” “A Good Quaking Bag-Pudding,” and “To Fatten Young Chickens in a Wonderful Degree.” Sir Kenelm’s official duty at the court of Charles the First was Gentleman of the Bed-chamber; but if I had been Charles, I should have transferred him to the Pantry.
The Closet Opened (which was not published until after Sir Kenelm’s death; he was born 1603, died 1665) is the kind of book delightfully apt for the sad, sagacious, and solitary, for one cannot spend an hour in it without deriving a lively sense of the opulence and soundness of life. The affectionate attention Sir Kenelm pays the raisin makes him seem almost a Volsteadian figure: in his pages that excellent and powerful fruity capsule plays, perhaps for the first time in history, a heroic and leading rôle. Consider this:
TO MAKE ALE DRINK QUICK
When small Ale hath wrought sufficiently, draw into bottles; but first put into every bottle twelve good raisins of the Sun split and stoned. Then stop up the bottle close and set it in sand (gravel) or a cold dry Cellar. After a while this will drink exceedingly quick and pleasant. Likewise take six Wheat-corns, and bruise them, and put into a bottle of Ale; it will make it exceeding quick and stronger.