tackle him frankly, man to man, and not as one having authority and abusing that same," he laughed. "Meantime, we must be patient. Write often, but not so often as to excite remark; and I shall return in the autumn."

"To stay?"

"Ah!" said John, "that depends on you."

He had not meant to be satirical, but the slight inflection of his tone cut Lady Mary to the heart.

Her vivid imagination saw her conduct in its worst light: vacillating, feeble, deserting the man she loved at the moment she had led him to expect triumph; dismissing her faithful servant without his reward. Then, in a flash, came the other side of the picture the mother of a grown-up son— a wounded soldier dependent on her love-seeking her personal happiness as though there existed no past memories, no present duties, to hinder the fulfilling of her own belated romance. "Oh, John," said Lady Mary, "tell me what to do? No, no; don't tell meor I shall do it-and I mustn't."

"My darling," he said, "I only tell you to wait." He rallied himself to speak cheerfully, and to bring the life and color back to her sad, white face. "Just at this moment I quite realize I should be a disturbing element, and I am going to get myself out of the way as quickly as politeness permits. And you are to devote yourself to Peter, and not to be torn with selfreproach. If we act sensibly, and don't precipitate matters, nobody need have

a grievance, and Peter and I will be the best of friends in the future, I hope. There is little use in having grown-up wits if we snatch our happiness at the expense of other people's feelings, as young folk so often do." The twinkle in his bright eyes, and the kindly humor of his smile, restored her shaken self-confidence.

"Oh, John, no one else could ever understand-as you understand. If only Peter-"

"Peter is a boy," said John, "dreaming as a boy dreams, resolving as a boy resolves; and his dreams and his resolutions are as light as thistledown: the first breath of a new fancy, or a fresh interest, will blow them away. I put my faith in the future, in the near future. Time works wonders."

He stooped and kissed her hands, one after the other, with a possessive tenderness that told her better than words, that he had not resigned his claims.

"Now I'll go and offer my congratulations to the hero of the day," said John. "I must not put off any longer; and it is quite settled that our secret is to remain our secret-for the present."

Then he stepped out on to the terrace, and Lady Mary looked after him with a little sigh and smile.

She lifted a hand-mirror from the silver table that stood at her elbow, and shook her head over it.

"It's all very well for him, and it's all very well for Peter," she said; "but Time-Time is my worst enemy."

The three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir Thomas Browne, presents the opportunity of a brief review of his life and works. Such a task can be undertaken without much risk to the reputation of the critic, who in this case has no difficulties to torment him in ascertaining what may be Browne's exact rank as a man of letters; and as his works have kept themselves apart for the pleasure of a decidedly esoteric taste, the same task may never be altogether gratuitous. Something similar perhaps might be said of all the choicest examples of Jacobean and Caroline prose, but to Browne in a special degree is due this attribute of exclusiveness, which removes him somewhat both from the great masters whom he followed and from the great company into which he came. Hooker was barely five years out of the world before Browne came into it: Donne had reached an almost perfect mastery in his art, while he was still an apprentice at it; and it was as the contemporary of Milton and Taylor and Bunyan that this Caroline physician helped to make the middle of the seventeenth century the chancery of some of the most unforgettable things in the history of English Letters. Nevertheless, he stands by himself. He did not employ his pen to vindicate ecclesiastical systems or public policies; he neither refuted Puritanism like Hooker nor defended it like Milton; he was not purposely and frankly didactic like Bishop Taylor, and as unlikely was he to have written the Religio Medici with the unadorned simplicity of preacher Bunyan as Bunyan was to have filled Christian's mouth with the aphorisms of Seneca or the syllogisms of Aris1523

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XXIX.

I.

totle. In tolerably equal proportions all of them were busy setting up the stately structure of English prose: under the hands of all there went forth a mighty sound of axe and hammer; and the first Temple arose by the hands of all. But Browne was not a Cyclopean workman like Milton; he was not an architect like Hooker; it was less on the stonework and the pillars of the Temple than on the fine work and the pure gold thereof that he exercised the genius of his craft. By reason of these two things, the aloofness of his thoughts (as we have them) from questions that burned in his own day, and the rarity of the manner in which he delivered himself of them, he has in a sense discouraged the popularity of his own writings, and at the same time accorded a reasonable point of view from which to consider them. The result is that Browne has been intensely rather than extensively appreciated; and his influence, wherever it has been felt, has been so deeply felt as to confer the most distinguished part of their literary manner upon several great writers long after his own date.

It is not difficult to imagine how the valedictory triumph of Hydriotaphia must have stirred the pulse of a genuine rhetorician, like De Quincey, and smitten upon his ears like the rumbling of the chariots of the Gods. Born out of due season, perhaps, but still the undoubted spiritual offspring and the most undisguised of all the pupils of the Caroline writer is Charles Lamb; and on the threshold of our own century there is passage after passage in the miscellaneous writings of Stevenson to suggest that the most fastidious and elaborate of

modern writers has just risen in a hot enthusiasm from the pages of Sir Thomas Browne. To derive an author, to declare his ancestry, to unravel and separate the various elements in his style, these are usually hazardous undertakings, uncertain at the best, and unprofitable in the end; but back to Browne there is a clear road of return upon which here and there are lifted faithful finger-posts to the fountain that has refreshed the sands and revived the fruitful fields of three centuries.

II.

London has the honor of being Browne's birthplace. He was born within the city in the parish of St. Michael in Cheapside on October 19th, 1605. He claimed an honorable descent on both sides of his house, his father being of an ancient Cheshire family, a fact which did not prevent him from carrying on a successful trade as a merchant. His mother was Ann Garraway, the daughter of a Sussex gentleman. Beyond the fact that he flourished in his business little is known of this Cheapside merchant, who died before he was likely to have exerted any permanent influence upon the character of his son. Probably the boy inherited part of his mystical temperament from him. "His father," says Mrs. Lyttleton, Sir Thomas's daughter, "used to open his breast when he was asleep, and kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Oviglu's father, that the Holy Ghost would take possession there." But he did not live to witness the effects of this consecration, and after a brief widowhood his wife married Sir Thomas Dutton. Browne was left with means amounting to affluence for those days, though his step-father and guardian appears to have dealt

covetously with his heritage and impaired its value. Though Dutton's main object in seeking the marriage seems to have been money; and though the itch of acquisition was irritated by the contemplation of the £6000 which was his stepson's share of the paternal wealth, there is nothing to show that his treatment of Browne was otherwise harsh or unnatural. He was sent to Winchester School, whence in 1623 he was removed to Oxford and entered as a gentleman-commoner at Broadgates Hall. About that time the Hall was merged into the new foundation of Pembroke College, and Sir Thomas Browne is really the chief glory in the history of that comparatively venerable society. Dr. Johnson, another famous son of Pembroke, does not miss the opportunity of commenting on Browne's connection with the college, "to which the zeal or gratitude of those that love it most can wish little better than that it may long proceed as it began."

Even the zeal or gratitude of those that love it most, in common justice to the material from which the sons of men are fashioned, could hardly expect a college to continue fertile in the production of men like Browne. But there is no hint of academic laurels. To be sure he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1626 and that of Master of Arts in 1629, and then turned his mind, apparently not his love, from the humanities to the study of medicine. In the eyes of his college, however, he was a pattern of virtue and industry, hungry and athirst after knowledge, filling his mind not with husks, but with the solid mental nourishment dispensed by the prophets of his generation; and all his days, long after he had ceased to be the member of a university he never ceased to be a student. Sys

tematically learned he may not have been, but even in an age of learning his erudition was profound and may have been astonishing. His writings contain rather the promise than the proof of it, though there is never a sign to show that he played the charlatan with his pen and counterfeited an intimacy with the Muses which he did not enjoy. The bulk of his work is a bundle of notes redeemed from their essential irregularity by the device of periodic elaborations, a redemption indeed that fixed an era in the history of English prose literature; still the bulk of it must pass as the observations of a man who delighted himself with excursions and explorations in the by-ways, and was not content to follow the great highroad of knowledge.

After leaving the university Browne settled in Oxfordshire, in the practice of medicine, but the temptation to see the world was greater than his love of physic, and visits to Ireland. France, and Italy followed. He seems, however, to have employed himself busily in medical studies at Montpellier and Padua, and on his return homeward through Holland he stayed at Leyden and there graduated in medicine. This was probably in 1633, and it may be noted that he became a doctor of physic of the University of Oxford in 1637, and ultimately settled down to the practice of his profession in Norwich, where he spent the remainder of his life.

His first book, Religio Medici, it is generally believed, was written before his settlement in Norwich, probably in 1635. It is clear that this treatise has the character of a private exercise, and was the result of a slow process of creation during which the author indulged himself by making a record of his speculations, and more particularly by practising and designing the forms of language into which they

should be cast. Without doubting the purity of motive and the sincerity of piety which we expect of the Religio Medici, it is likely that Browne was as much concerned with the manner of his discourse as with the matter of it; and when the last ornaments and graces had been given to the composition, he was proud to submit it to the admiration of his friends, who, it appears, bandied it about from hand to hand like a common property, until by corrupted transcriptions "it arrived in a most depraved copy at the press." In this event, which raised a gentle storm of mock indignation on the part of the author, there is nothing very odd; but the sequel is interesting. The corrupted version came into the hands of Sir Kenelm Digby, a gentleman who was extraordinarily ready with his pen. It comes to his ears that a "notable piece," by one Dr. Thomas Browne, has issued from the press; he takes measures to provide himself with it, and at last does possess himself of it; after which he reads the book, writes another by way of reply, and sends it to the Earl of Dorset. The remarkable thing is that the whole process, from the first tidings of the piece to the voluminous reply to it, was accomplished within the space of twenty-four hours. And yet, says Dr. Johnson, Digby's book contained many acute remarks and many profound speculations. "The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life," comments Johnson on these transactions in a sentence almost as risible as the sentiment; and, truly enough, there is something highly amusing in the correspondence that followed between the two authors, in the softness and ceremony with which Browne repudiates the spurious Religio Medici, and in the reverences and verbal salutations with which Sir Kenelm replies. After all it is some

thing of a farce, and in the exchange of elaborate civilities upon which both gentlemen entered with appetite, they present the spectacle of a pair of gorgeous peacocks contemplating the finery of each others' feathers.

The best portrait of Sir Thomas Browne in our possession is from the pen of Mr. John Whitefoot, who was his intimate friend, and first biographer. The characterization is quaint, but it is naive and unskilled enough to impress one with its candor and fidelity. To make a paraphrase of this slight but intimate sketch, Browne had nothing to blush for in the matter of physical endowments. He was a man of moderate stature and of a complexion answering to his name; neither too stout nor too lean. He paid no heed to the fashion of his dress, wore the plainest clothes, and despised fine plumage. We are told, also, that he counted it a necessity of physical well-being that he should always keep himself warm without loading his body, as Suetonius reports of Augustus, with a multitude of garments sufficient to clothe a good family. His memory,--not so eminent as that of Seneca or Scaliger- was both tenacious and capacious to such an extent that he remembered everything that was remarkable in any book that he read. He had by heart most of the best passages of the Latin poets (he confesses to a knowledge of five or six languages), and he had read most of the historians, ancient and modern. Indeed, so notable was his sagacity and knowledge of all history that Mr. Whitefoot takes pains to publish an opinion that "he would have made an extraordinary man for the Privy Council, not much inferior to the famous Padre Paulo, the late oracle of the Venetian State." Notwithstanding those imposing virtues and talents Browne was excellent fireside company, when he was at leisure

from his profession or his books; he was punctilious in his attendance at the public services of the Church, never missed the sacrament in his parish, and upon a perusal of the best English sermons never forgot to bestow upon them the most liberal applause.

Mr. Whitefoot's delineation is probably as just and true to life as we may expect from an intimate and an enthusiast, but there is some temptation to believe that he has drawn with an idealizing pencil. We seem to be conscious

of imperfections, which

might have ranked as virtues under ancient dispensations of moral law, but in the new heaven and the new earth can hardly escape a chiding. For a Greek, perhaps, Browne stood upon a pinnacle of moral perfection and arrived at the apex of the Aristotelian code of virtue. The style of the man is something like the style of his pen,-lordly and splendid and magnanimous. He is proud, because he has escaped the first and father-sin of pride; and yet he must have a splendid and uncommon faith apart from the vulgar faiths that confessed their weakness before the mysteries of religion. Ordinary intellects, and even advanced judgments, should beware of the pleadings of a Lucian or a Machiavel; but as for him who is above such temptations, he (if he alone) can detect the secretary of hell by his writing and Satan by his rhetoric, and even in the most fabulous and staggering conceits can see the little finger of the Almighty.

From all which, and many similar self-revelations, Browne appears on his own admissions as an intellectual and moral aristocrat, who was pleased to take the vulgar under his patronage. He was frequently the mouthpiece of his own virtues, and was not above certain loud and public proclamations of his own praises by his own trum