The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.

The voice of prophecies is like that of whispering-places; they who are near, hear nothing; those at the farthest extremity will know all. Futurity still shortens, and time present sucks in time to come.

The writings of Sir Thomas Browne will perhaps never become widely popular. As Spenser has been called the poet's poet, so we may call him the man-of-letters' prosaist. It requires a certain exercise of taste to apprehend his beauties, and a patience of the intellect to sympathize with his peculiar moods. He deals with obsolete and unfamiliar problems; he propounds riddles which no living Oedipus would care to solve; he ponders oftentimes on nugatory or fastidious questions, investing trifles with a dignity and splendour not their own. His noblest passages lie wedged like lumps of gold in masses of hard barren quartz; and the contemplations which awake his most ethereal fancy are such as few would pause to dwell upon. Wrecks of forgotten fables, antediluvian computations, names sculptured on the pyramids, or nameless urns consigned by hands unknown to alien soil, the influences of the stars, the occult potencies of herbs, interpretations of irrelevant dreams, fine disputations on theologies of schoolmen, conjectures of the soul's state before birth and after death -all things, in short, that are vague, impalpable, and charged with spiritual symbolism, this man loves to brood on. Round these topics his thought eddies like a dark and swirling stream. He spins sentence after sentence, and interweaves magnificent period with period, returning ever

to the point whereupon he started, dyeing the threads of his harmonious discourse in dim and shadowy colours which the dusky thought supplies. There is something inconclusive in the habit of his fancy, a delight in intellectual twilight, a moth-like flitting to and fro in regions where no certainty can be attained. On closing one of his laborious treatises, we feel that Morpheus has been leading us through labyrinths of dreams. Left at the end without a clue, suspense of judgment, puzzled by variety of detail, we are released from the magician's spell by a sudden dissolution of the vision and a gradual, return into the world of facts. It is like awakening from the intoxication of hashish or of opium.

Whatever he was as a man and agent in the world, as a rhetorician he preferred the crepuscular limbo between attainable knowledge and irresolute conjecture. There he spread the downy, dimly-gorgeous wings of his imagination. While England was being torn with civil war, he pondered in his study upon Pharaoh, and the song the Sirens sang, and the name Achilles bore among the daughters of the King of Scyros. Still these remote and visionary cogitations did not distract him from the business and ambitions of the present. He had travelled in many parts of Europe, conversed with several sorts of men, and formed a practical philosophy from wide experience of human life. Therefore his most hazy speculations are shot with flashes of penetrative wisdom; and when we least demand them in his work, we light on epigrams of worldly prudence.

Unexpectedness is a main source of his charm as a writer. There is a sustained paradox in his thought, which does not seem to have belonged to the man, so much as to the verbal artist. He professes a mixture of the boldest scepticism and the most puerile credulity. But his scepticism is the prelude to confessions of impassioned faith, and his credulity is the result of tortuous reflections on the enigmas of life and revelation. Perhaps the following paragraph enables us to understand the permanent temper of his mind most truly :—

"As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith: the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossible est. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith, but persuasion."

Nothing short of an entire and impenetrable mystery will please him. He proceeds to thank God that he was not born in the age of miracles, for then his faith would have been an easy and common thing. His great regret is that he did not breathe this air before the days of Moses and of Christ; and he envies the patriarchs, for "they

only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before His coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities."

The creeds of the Apostles and Nicea and S. Athanasius are far too clear and simple for this aristocrat of belief, "nauseating crambe verities and questions over-queried," abhorring "flat and flexible truths," retiring with disgust from "vulgar speculations." It is the same desire to escape from the palpable and real into the vague and immaterial regions of the intellect, which makes him give no other reason for his contempt of reliques than that their antiquity is not remote enough. The bones of S. Peter or S. Mark are too close, forsooth, in time to satisfy him. They win but vulgar credence, having naught to exercise a select divinatory instinct. Mere age cannot perplex his fancy, which loves to explore the recesses of the grave, and follow spirits on their flight toward eternity. Yet, because around the past there clings a shadowy mist of unreality, he is wont to carry up his cogitations to the beginning of the world. Methuselah is a name often upon his lips, and the extreme age of an opinion seems to him to be some warrant for its truth. In the Garden of Eden he walks as though he had been bred there, and reasons upon Adam's thoughts with the familiarity of one who shared his perplexities.

Sir Thomas Browne's brain was like a crucible for reducing heterogeneous and various experience to the potable gold of abstruse imagination. The world he mostly thought

of was the world of his own mind; the material globe be used at times for his recreation. When he affronts Death, he does not dwell upon its terror or its calm, but records his "abject conceit of this common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements." The gorgeous tombs and sculptured urns of princes make him exclaim in scorn, that "to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration." When he casts his eyes backward over years gone by, he sighs because "it is too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs." Between the world of facts and the world of dreams he sees no difference, except that perhaps the sleeping is more real than the waking. "There is an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be an emblem or picture of the other; we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleep, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul." In measuring himself, he takes the universe for his standard : "The earth is a point, not only in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly or celestial part within us That surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot persuade me I have any." Although with obvious sincerity and feeling candour he assures us that he has no taint of pride, yet he stands thus haughtily upon the pedestal of human dignity: "There is surely a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun."

We need not wonder why a thinker of this stamp, to