laughed incredulously. But Lady Fanshawe says this "was the only thing true he had declaimed with them. This was his infirmity, though otherwise of most excellent parts, and a very fine-bred gentleman." In John Aubrey's "Brief Lives" ("set down between 1669 and 1696") Digby is described as "such a goodly person, gigantique and great voice, and had so graceful elocution and noble address, etc., that had he been drop't out of the clowdes in any part of the world he would have made himself respected."
It may be of interest to add that a daughter of Sir Kenelm Digby's second son married a Sir John Conway, of Flintshire. Her granddaughter, Honora, married a Sir John Glynne whose great-grandson, Sir Stephen Glynne, was the father of the late Mrs. W. E. Gladstone.
In 1690, Lemery had the courage to express some doubts about this powder of sympathy, and in 1773 Baumé declared its pretensions to be absolutely illusory.
To conclude the account of this curious delusion, a few quotations from English literature may be added.
There are several allusions to sympathetic cures in Hudibras. For instance,
For by his side a pouch he wore
Replete with strange hermetick powder
That wounds nine miles point blank would solder,
By skilful chemist at great cost
Extracted from a rotten post.
And again,
'Tis true a scorpion's oil is said
To cure the wounds the vermin made;
And weapons dress'd with salves restore
And heal the wounds they made before.
In Dryden's Tempest, the sympathetic treatment is referred to. Hippolito has been wounded by Fernando,
