SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

HE reputation of Sir Thomas Browne is founded on his Religio Medici and Enquiry into Vulgar Errors, and also on some tracts, the most remarkable of which are entitled Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus. If nothing but his Vulgar Errors had been handed down to us, we might have numbered him among the possessors of vast and recondite learning, who wasted ingenuity and patience upon subjects of little interest and of no permanent value. This work of erudition does not display the author's charm as a thinker and a stylist; his unique mental and moral qualities are not so clearly reflected in it as those of Burton, for example, in the Anatomy of Melancholy. But the case is different with Browne's other compositions. The higher gifts of style which he commands, the majesty and harmony of his language, the nobility of his ✓ sentiments, the depth and range of his imagination, and the far-stretched grandeur of his speculative fancy, are so brilliantly exhibited throughout the Religio Medici, in one

or two sonorous passages of Cyrus's Garden, and in the peroration of the treatise on Urn Burial, that we must place him among the foremost writers of English prose. It is as a great master of diction, as a rhetorician in the highest sense of that abused word, as one who improvised solemn cathedral voluntaries upon the organ of our language in its period of cumbrous and scholastic pomp, that Sir Thomas Browne proclaims himself the rival of Jeremy Taylor and the peer of Milton in their highest flights of cadenced prose. Like all English prosaists before the time of Dryden, he is unequal in literary manner, composing Capparently without a fixed idea of style, indulging in whims and oddities, attaining his most sublime effects by felicities of verbal music rather than by conscious mastery of art. "He fell into an age," says Johnson, "in which our language began to lose the stability which it obtained in the time of Elizabeth; and was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastic skill, by moulding it according to his own fancy. Milton, in consequence of this encroaching licence, began to introduce the Latin idiom: and Browne, though he gave less disturbance to our structures and phraseology, yet poured in a multitude of exotic words. His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another." In the main, this criticism is just. What Coleridge called Browne's "hyperlatinism," renders his

prose no model for the student. Its defects are obvious and patent. Its excellences are such as only the greatest artist in language, imbued with profound thought, and inspired with glowing imagination, can hope to emulate. Yet before the close of this Introduction, I think it will be clear that Sir Thomas Browne, in his best moments, produced not only sentences, but lengthy passages of flawless quality— inimitable periods governed by unerring rhythm in which various elements of speech are harmonized by the [controlling sense of assonantal and alliterative music.

Sir Thomas Browne was born in London on the 19th of October, 1605. He died at Norwich on the 19th of ✔ October, 1682 having exactly reached the age of seventyseven-a circumstance which, could he have transmitted posthumous reflections on his own death, would doubtless have inspired his curious mind with many mystic contemplations. His father was a merchant, born of a good Cheshire stock, who had acquired considerable wealth. In temperament this man, of whom we know almost nothing, may have resembled his more illustrious son; for it is recorded of the boy's infancy that "his father 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." These are the words of Sir Thomas's daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, who probably had them from his own lips. A certain air of mystery and consecration, as of one dedicated, for whom nothing could ✔ be common or unclean, to whom his own life seemed "a

miracle of thirty years," and the visible world an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson" of the thoughts of God, surrounded the man from childhood to old age.

He had the misfortune to lose his father early. His mother shortly afterwards married Sir Thomas Dutton, who proved, it is asserted, a rapacious guardian. The boy was sent to Winchester, and in 1623 proceeded to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree in 1627. His share of the paternal estate amounted to some £6000, and this was a fair fortune at that period. The natural bent of his genius toward physical science determined his choice of medicine as a profession. After practising a short while in Oxfordshire, he travelled through Ireland with his stepfather, and then set out upon a_tour in Europe. At Montpellier and Padua he prosecuted medical studies, and acquired the French and Italian languages. Returning northward, he obtained a degree of M.D. at Leyden in 1633. When he reached England, he settled for some time as practising physician at Shipley Hall, near Halifax; and it was probably during that residence that he composed the Religio Medici. Friends induced him to leave a retreat where his talents had too little opportunity for their display. Accordingly, upon the joint solicitations of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Charles Le Gros, and Drs. Lushington and Lewyn-all of them important Norfolk worthies-he established himself in the ✓ old city of Norwich, where the remainder of his life was spent. This took place in 1637, when he had reached