" INTRODUCTION I. LIFE OF BROWNE 1605-1682 Our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare." "At my Nativity," says Browne in Religio Medici, “my Ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I was born in the Planetary hour of Saturn." By this he means that he was born on a Saturday in October. It was the 19th day of the month, in the year 1605. The place was St Michael-le-Quern in Cheapside. His father, also Thomas, by birth sprung from a family of Cheshire squires and by occupation a London mercer, died early; and his mother married Sir Thomas Dutton. Rapacious guardians are said to have destroyed the child's patrimony; but his youthful years show no sign of poverty. He went to Winchester School in 1616, and to Oxford in 1623. There he matriculated a fellow-commoner of Broadgates Hall, which changed its name to Pembroke College before he left the University. Of his Oxford career we can say little, except that at the University, as previously at school, he must have been acquiring that wide knowledge of Latin and Greek which he displays throughout his writings. Oxford could afford him very scanty instruction in science or medicine; but, even before his Oxford days, he had begun to botanise. Speaking of his acquaintance with the plants around Halifax, he declares in Religio Medici that he seems to know fewer than when he knew only a hundred and gathered his specimens in Cheapside. Browne proceeded B.A. in 1626, M.A. in 1629. About this time he visited Ireland with his step-father; but we have only fugitive references to his stay there. In 1630 he left England for the South of France, to study at Montpellier, long noted for its medical school, especially the departments of botany and anatomy. Next he went to Padua University, then in high repute for scientific and medical studies, in particular surgery, physiology and anatomy. He finished his Continental sojourn by studying in Holland, at Leyden, which was specially renowned for chemistry. There he is believed to have graduated M.D. He was back in England in 1633, and settled near Halifax. In July, 1637, he was incorporated doctor of physic at Oxford, and soon after began the practice of his profession in Norwich, where he was to remain till his death forty-five years later. In 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham, sixteen years his junior. She was “a lady of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband, both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." The wits found matter for raillery in the marriage, since Browne had appeared to despise matrimony in Religio Medici, which though not yet published ⚫ was freely circulating in manuscript. The outbreak of the Great Rebellion was now near. Norfolk was puritan, and the men of Norwich were very lukewarm churchmen. When fighting began, the city was fortified in the Parliamentary interest. Browne was a royalist, but he had no intention of making a martyr of himself. Discretion, he maintained, is the better part of all actions, civil and religious. To become a martyr needlessly is simply to commit suicide. While holding it discreet, however, to abstain from active resistance, he figured once as a passive resister. In the summer of 1642, Newcastle was seized by royalist soldiers. Some months later, a fund was raised to equip Parliamentary troops for the re-capture of the strategic fortress on the Tyne. The substantial citizens of Norwich were invited to contribute. Browne was one of the 452 who declined. Other wise, he seems to have gone about his professional duties, regardless outwardly at least-of state affairs. Besides, he was at this time busy with his confession of faith, Religio Medici, the first authorised edition of which appeared in 1643. For a number of years Browne had been pondering over the strange ideas held by the majority of people on points of history,-natural, civil and religious-and so forth. This resulted in the publication (1646) of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed Truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors. In Vulgar Errors, as the work is usually styled, he begins by stating several causes of mistaken beliefs the infirmity of human nature, adherence to antiquity and to authority, andwhat to Browne is the greatest promoter of false opinion -the father of lies, the Devif. Many of the beliefs belong to the unnatural natural history, the kind drawn upon for similes by John Lyly in his Euphues and frequently alluded to by Shakespeare. Some of the errors are: the salamander lives in fire; the chameleon lives on air; the ostrich digests iron; the phoenix exists; the peacock is ashamed of its legs; the stork is found only in a republic or a free state; the world was created in the month of March; a_man weighs heavier dead than alive, the elephant has no joints in his legs, Piy Browne intended to write Vulgar Errors in Latin to appeal universally to scholars, but changed his mind in order to benefit the "ingenuous gentry" of England. But it is full of strange words of Latin origin and is by no means easy reading. It contains, however, much to interest and to amuse. Scientific truth, indeed, is not Browne's sole aim. It is the investigation he enjoys; and the more marvellous a tale is, the more enthusiastic is his discussion. In addition, he was himself in no small measure imbued with the contemporary credulity. Browne's repute for multifarious learning brought him numerous letters from various quarters—even from b Iceland; and he was always ready to answer. He answered enquiries on the plants of the Bible; on the fishes eaten by Christ after the resurrection; on artificial hills and mounds; on languages and particularly the Saxon tongue; on Troas and the cities of the Dead Sea; on Apollo's oracle to Croesus; on whales stranded along the Norfolk coast. Besides his wide acquaintance with Latin and Greek writers even the most out-of-the-way-he possessed a competent knowledge of the Bible in the original languages, with the commentaries thereon. Like Milton, he belonged to the select band of seventeenth-century Englishmen who read Dante's Divina Commedia in Italian. Other modern languages he also knew well. He was thoroughly versed in the Authorised Version of the Bible. But no other work in English-poetry or prose-does he ever mention or allude to, with the one exception of Hudibras, and he merely recites a list of Greek and Latin burlesques which it called to his mind. For a dozen years Browne published nothing; and then in 1658 came Hydriotaphia, with its elfin melody, meditations on cinerary urns recently unearthed in Norfolk. The same volume contained The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered. The quincunx is an arrangement of five objects, one in each corner of a rectangle and one in the middle-exactly what we see in the five of playing-cards. So were the trees in Cyrus's garden arranged. Browne ransacks heaven and earth, sea and land, and all that they contain, to discover similar forms. He finds them in St Andrew's Cross, in architecture, in crowns, in the beds of the ancients, in the Roman battle-array, in the labyrinth of Crete, in fruits and seeds, in skins of animals, and in scales of fishes. Not long after the publication of this volume, Cromwell died, 3rd September; and Browne rejoiced in the collapse of the protectorate and the restoration of monarchy. When coronation day came, 23rd April, 1661, it was with deep satisfaction that, in a private letter, he described the loyal doings in Norwich, part of which was the hanging and burning in effigy of Cromwell, “whose head," Browne adds, "is now upon Westminster Hall, together with Ireton's and Bradshaw's." Browne believed in the existence and the active malevolence of witches. In 1664 occurred an incident over which several of his biographers have waxed very angry: one of them calls it "the most culpable and the most stupid action of his life." At the spring assizes, Bury St Edmunds, two women were accused of witchcraft. Sir Matthew Hale, the Lord Chief Baron, doubted the credibility of the evidence. Instead of directing the jury to acquit, he called upon Browne to give his judgment in the case. Browne declared "he was clearly of opinion that the fits were natural, but heightened by the Devil's co-operating with the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies." Eighteenth-century writers assert that Browne's authority influenced the jury in finding the women guilty. Now, if Hale was against conviction, he acted wrongly in calling upon another to speak, and one whose belief in witches-standing in print for over twenty years he himself must have known. Help in acquitting could hardly be expected from Browne. Hale seems to have wished to shirk responsibility. We are told he "put it off from himself as much as he could." In charging the jury, he expressed his own belief in the existence of witches, but refrained from insisting that the evidence was untrustworthy. Why should Browne be singled out for blame? He simply uttered what he sincerely believed, and his belief was that of the majority of contemporary lawyers, clergymen and philosophers. The jurymen of Bury St Edmunds hardly required Browne's authority to make them convict. At the assizes there in 1645-46 nearly fifty persons were condemned for witchcraft. New laws against witches had been passed in James I's reign; and from then to the end of Charles II's reign, some 70,000 victims are said to have suffered under these laws. |