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course of events about him; "being erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together they will be error itself." And yet, congruously with a dreamy sweetness of character we may find expressed in his very features, he seems not greatly concerned at the temporary suppression of the institutions he values so much.

He seems to possess some inward Platonic reality of them-church or monarchy-to hold by in idea, quite beyond the reach of Round-head or unworthy Cavalier. In the power of what is inward and inviolable in his religion, he can still take note;-"In my solitary and retired imagination (neque enim cum porticus aut me lectulus accepit, desum mihi,) I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is ever with me."

His father, a merchant of London, with some claims to ancient descent, left him early in possession of ample means. Educated at Winchester and Oxford, he visited Ireland, France and Italy; and in the year 1633, at the age of twenty-eight, became Doctor of Medicine at Leyden. Three years later he established himself as a physician at Norwich for the remainder of his life, having married a lady, described as beautiful and attractive, and affectionate also, as we may judge from her letters, and postscripts to those of her husband, in an orthography of a homeliness amazing even for that age. Dorothy Browne bore him ten children, six of whom he survived.

Their house at Norwich, even then an old one it would seem, must have grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of antiquities -antiquities properly so called; his old Roman, or Romanised, British urns, from Walsingham or Brampton, for instance; and those natural objects which he studied somewhat in the temper of a curiosity-hunter or antiquary. In one of the old churchyards of Norwich he makes the first discovery of adipocere, of which grim substance" a portion still remains with

him." For his multifarious experiments he must have had his laboratory. The old window-stanchions had become magnetic, proving, as he thinks, that iron "acquires verticity" from long lying in one position. Once we find him re-tiling the place. It was then, perhaps, that he made the observation that bricks and tiles also acquire "magnetic alliciency "-one's whole house, one might fancy; as indeed, he holds the earth itself to be a vast lode-stone.

The very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time it costs his readers, that slow Latinity which Johnson imitated from him, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity will abbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place. Yet he is by no means indolent. Besides wide book-learning, experimental research at home, and indefatigable observation in the open air, he prosecutes the ordinary duties of a physician; contrasting himself indeed with other students, "whose quiet and unmolested doors afford no such distractions." To most men of mind sensitive as his, his chosen studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they did, upon death and decay. It is well, perhaps, that life should be something of a "meditation upon death": to many, certainly, Browne's would have seemed too like a life-long following of one's own funeral. A true museum is seldom a cheerful placeoftenest induces the feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind. Only, for him, (poetic dream, or philosophic apprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful genius for exquisitely impassioned speech,) over all those ugly anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics, there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one day to re-assert itself-stranger far than any fancied odylic gravelights!

Sir Thomas Browne.

When Browne settled at Norwich, being then about thirty-six years old, he had already completed the Religio Medici'; a desultory collection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends, at all events with no purpose of immediate publication. It had been lying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his own extraordinarily perplexed manuscript, or in manuscript copies, when, in 1642, an incorrect printed version from one of those copies, "much corrupted by transcription at various hands," appeared anonymously. Browne, decided royalist as he was, in spite of seeming indifference, connects this circumstance with the unscrupulous use of the press for political purposes, and especially against the king at that time. Just here a romantic figure comes on the scene. Son of the unfortunate young Everard Digby who perished on the scaffold for some half-hearted partici. pation in the gunpowder plot, Kenelm Digby, brought up in the reformed religion, had returned in manhood to the religion of his father. In his intellectual composition he had, in common with Browne, a scientific interest, oddly tinged with both poetry and scepticism; he had also a strong sympathy with religious reaction, and a more than sentimental love for a seemingly vanishing age of faith, which he, for one, would not think of as vanishing. A copy of that surreptitious edition of the 'Religio Medici' found him a prisoner on suspicion of a too active royalism, and with much time on his hands. The Roman Catholic, although, secure in his definite orthodoxy, he finds himself indifferent on many points, (on the reality of witchcraft, for instance,) on which Browne's more timid, personally-grounded faith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, to detect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole much attracted him, and hastily put forth his " animadversions" upon it. Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself com

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mitted to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of the Religio Medici' published at last with his name. There have been many efforts to formulate the religion of a layman, which might be rightly understood, perhaps, as something more than what is called natural, yet less than ecclesiastical, or "professional" religion. Though its habitual mode of conceiving experience is on a different plan, yet it would recognise the legiti macy of the traditional interpretation of that experience, generally and by implication; only, with a marked reserve as to religious particulars, both of thought and language, out of a real reverence or awe, as proper only for a special place. Such is the lay religion, as we may find it in Addison, in Gray, in Thackeray; and there is something of a concession- -a concession on second thoughts about it. Browne's Religio Medici' is designed as the expression of a mind more difficult of belief than that of the mere "layman"; it is meant for the religion of the man of science. Actually, it is something less to the point, in any balancing of the religious against the worldly view of things, than the proper religion of a layman. For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterous doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion certainly nothing of the character of a concession. He holds that there has never existed an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion is but the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education, a religion of manifold association. For him the wonders of religion, its supernatural events or agencies, are almost natural facts or processes. "Even in this material fabric, the spirits walk as freely exempt from the affection of time, place and motion, as beyond the extremest circumference." Had not Divine interference designed to raise the dead, nature herself is in act to do it,-to lead out the "incinerated" soul from the retreats of her dark laboratory. Certainly Browne has not, like Pascal, made the "great resolution,"

by the apprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to the world with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis. It is from the homelessness of the world which science analyses so victoriously, its dark unspirituality wherein the soul he is conscious of seems such a stranger, that Pascal "turns again to his rest," in the conception of a world of wholly reasonable agencies. For Browne, on the contrary, the light is full, design everywhere obvious, its conclusion easy to draw, all small and great things marked clearly with the signature of the "Word." The adhesion, the difficult adhesion, of men such as Pascal is an immense contribution to controversy; the concession, again, of a man like Addison of great significance there. But in the adhesion of Browne, in spite of his crusade against "vulgar errors," there is no real significance. The 'Religio Medici' is a contribution, not to faith but, to piety; a refinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a help, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the maintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular calling.

From about this time Browne's letters afford a pretty clear view of his life as it went on in the house at Norwich. Many of these letters represent him in corespondence with the singular men who shared his own half poetic, half scientific turn of mind, with that impressibility towards what one might call the thaumaturgic elements in nature which has often made men dupes, and which is certainly an element in the somewhat atrabiliar mental complexion of that age in England. He corresponds seriously with William Lily, the astrologer; is acquainted with Dr. Dee, who had some connection with Norwich, and has "often heard him affirm, sometimes with oaths, that he had seen transmutation of pewter dishes and flagons into silver (at least), which the goldsmiths at Prague bought of him.' Browne is certainly an honest inves

tigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like that upon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature (as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like those sudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style), that he listens to her everyday talk so attentively. Of strange animals, strange cures, and the like, his correspondence is full. The very errors he combats are, of course, the curiosities of error,-those fascinating, irresistible, popular errors, which various kinds of people have insisted on gliding into because they like them. Even his heresies were old ones,-the very fossils of capricious opinion.

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It is as an industrious local naturalist that Browne comes before us first, full of the fantastic minute life in the fens and "Broads" around Norwich, its various marsh and sea birds. He is something of a vivisectionist also, which may not surprise us in an age which, for the propagation of truth, was ready to cut off men's ears. He finds one day Scarabæus capricornus odoratus," which he takes "to be mentioned by Monfetus, folio 150. He saith, Nucem moschatam et cinnamomum vere spirat' -to me it smelt like roses, santalum, and ambergris." "Musca tuliparum moschata," again, "is a small bee-like fly of an excellent fragrant odour, which I have often found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips." Is this within the experience of modern entomologists?

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The Garden of Cyrus,' though it ends indeed with a passage of wonderful felicity, certainly emphasises (to say the least) the defects of Browne's literary good qualities. His chimeric fancy carries him here into a kind of frivolousness, as if he felt almost too safe with his public, and were himself not quite serious, or dealing fairly with it; and with a writer such as Browne levity must of necessity be a little ponderous. Still, like one of those stiff gardens, halfway between the medieval garden

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and the true " English" garden of Temple or Walpole, actually to be seen in the background of some of the conventional portraits of that day, the fantasies of this indescribable exposition of the mysteries of the quincunx form part of the complete portrait of Browne himself; and it is in connection with it that, once or twice, the quaintly delightful pen of Evelyn comes into the correspondence, in connection with the "hortulane pleasure." "Norwich," he writes to Browne, "is a place, I understand, much addicted to the flowery part.' Professing himself a believer in the operation "of the air and genius of gardens upon human spirits, towards virtue and sanctity," he is all for natural gardens as against "those which appear like gardens of paste-board and march-pane, and smell more of paint than of flowers and verdure." Browne is in communication also with Ashmole and Dugdale, the famous antiquaries; to the latter of whom, who had written a work on the history of the embanking of fens, he communicates the discovery of certain coins, on a piece of ground," in the nature of an island in the fens."

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Far more interesting certainly than those curious scientific letters Browne's "domestic correspondence." Dobson, Charles the First's " English Tintoret," would seem to have painted a life-sized picture of Sir Thomas Browne and his family, after the manner of those big, urbane, family groups, then coming into fashion with the Dutch Masters. Of such a portrait nothing is now known. But in these oldfashioned, affectionate letters, transmitted often, in those troublous times, with so much difficulty, we have what is almost as graphic; a numerous group, in which, although so many of Browne's children died young, he was happy; with Dorothy Browne, occasionally adding her charming, illspelt postscripts to her husband's letters; the religious daughter who goes to daily prayers after the Restoration, which brought Browne the honour

of knighthood; and, above all, two Toms, son and grandson of Sir Thomas, the third Tom being the son of Dr. Edward Browne, now become distinguished as a physician in London (he attended John, Earl of Rochester, in his last illness at Woodstock), and sharing his father's studies; and his childish existence, as he lives away from his proper home in London, in the old house at Norwich, two hundred years ago, we see like a thing of to-day.

At first the two brothers, Edward and Thomas (the elder), are together in everything. Then Edward goes abroad for his studies, and Thomas, quite early, into the navy, where he certainly develops into a wonderfully gallant figure; passing away, however, from the correspondence, it is uncertain how, before he was of full age. From the first he is understood to be

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a lad of parts. "If you practise to write, you will have a good pen and style : and a delightful, boyish journal of his remains describing a tour the two brothers made in September, 1662, among the Derbyshire hills. "I received your two last letters," he writes to his father from aboard the Marie Rose,' "and give you many thanks for the discourse you sent me out of Vossius: De motu marium et ventorum. It seemed very hard to me at first; but I have now beaten it, and I wish I had the book." His father is pleased to think that he is "like to proceed not only a good navigator, but a good scholar": and he finds the much-exacting, old-classical prescription for the brave man fulfilled in him. On July 16th, 1666, the young man writes-still from the 'Marie Rose' :

"If it were possible to get an opportunity to send as often as I am desirous to write, you should hear more often from me, being now so near the grand action, from which I would by no means be absent. I extremely long for that thundering day wherein I hope you shall hear we have behaved ourselves like men, and to the honour of our country. 1 thank you for your directions for my ears against the noise of the guns, but I have

found that I could endure it; nor is it so intolerable as most conceive; especially when men are earnest, and intent upon their business, unto whom muskets sound but like popguns. It is impossible to express unto another how a smart sea-fight elevates the spirits of a man, and makes him despise all dangers. In and after all sea-fights, I have been very thirsty,

He died, as I said, early in life. We only hear of him later in connection with a trait of character observed in Tom the grandson, whose winning ways, and tricks of bodily and mental growth, are duly recorded in these letters: the reader will, I hope, pardon the following extracts from them :

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is fayne sometimes to play him asleep with a fiddle. When we send away our letters he scribbles a paper and will have it sent to his sister, and saith she doth not know how many fine things there are in Norwich. He delights his grandfather when he comes home." "Tom gives you many thanks for his clothes" (from London). He has appeared very fine this King's day with them.

"Tom presents his duty. A gentleman at our election asked Tom who hee was for? and he answered, For all four.' The gentleman replied that he answered like a physician's son."

"Tom would have his grandmother, his aunt Betty, and Frank, valentines: but hee conditioned with them that they should give him nothing of any kind that hee had ever had or seen before.'

"Tom is just now gone to see two bears which are to be shown." "Tom, his duty. He is begging books and reading of them.' "The players are at the Red Lion hard by; and Tom goes sometimes to see a play."

And then one day he stirs old memories

"The fairings were welcome to Tom. He finds about the house divers things that were your brother's (the late Edward's), "and Betty sometimes tells him stories about him, so that he was importunate with her to write his life in a quarter of a sheet of paper, and read it unto him, and will have still some more added."

"Just as I am writing" (learnedly about a comet, Jan. 7th, 1680-1) "Tom comes and tells me the blazing star is in the yard, and calls me to see it. It was but dim, and the sky not clear. I am very sensible of this sharp weather.”

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He seems to have come to no good end, riding forth one stormy night. Requiescat in pace!

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Of this long, leisurely existence the chief events were Browne's rare literary publications; some of his writings indeed having been left unprinted till after his death; while in the circumstances of the issue of every one of them there is something accidental, as if the world might have missed it altogether. Even the Discourse of Vulgar Errors,' the longest and most elaborate of his works, is entirely discursive and occasional, coming to an end with no natural conclusion, but only because the writer chose to leave off just there; and few probably have been the readers of the book as a consecutive whole. At times indeed we seem to have in it observations only, or notes, preliminary to some orderly composition. Dip into it: read, for instance, the chapter 'Of the Ring-finger,' or the chapters 'Of the Long Life of the Deer,' and on the 'Pictures of Mermaids, Unicorns, and some Others,' and the part will certainly seem more than the whole. Try to read it through, and you will soon feel cloyed; miss, very likely, its real worth to the fancy-the literary fancy, which finds its pleasure in inventive word and phrase; and become dull to the really vivid beauties of a book so lengthy, but with no real evolution. Though there are words, phrases, constructions innumerable, which remind one how much the work initiated in France by Madame de Rambouilletwork, done for England, we may think perhaps imperfectly, in the next century by Johnson and others—was really needed; yet the capacities of Browne's manner of writing, coming as it did so directly from the man, are felt even in his treatment of matters of science. As with Buffon, his full, ardent, sympathetic vocabulary, the poetry of his language, a poetry inherent in its elementary particles-the word, the epithet-helps to keep his of the reader, on the eye, and the eye object before it, and conduces directly to the purpose of the naturalist, the observer.

But, only one half observation, its

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