least careless, of all the stir and the admiration it had awakened. One reason why he might be disinclined to draw particular attention to it, is one which can with difficulty be appreciated by a modern reader. Those who then wrote on serious subjects, however original or even subversive their ideas might be, were expected to dignify their argument by copious quotations from the Ancients and from the Fathers. To appear without one's Latin was to stroll in the street on a public occasion without one's wig. Browne laments the lack of a library; there were no good books-that is to say books which enshrined the heavy learning of Europe-on his shelves at Shipden Hall. So Jeremy Taylor, a year or two later, bemoaned his misfortune at having to write The Liberty of Prophesying away from his library. Neither of these great authors appreciated the immense advantage they gained from being torn from their traditional support, and made to depend for their ornament on their imagination and their memory.

In 1637 some Norfolk friends united in urging Thomas Browne to come over to Norwich to settle there as a practising doctor. Among them was Mr. (afterwards Sir) Justinian Lewin, who was a Pembroke man. To the persuasions of these friends, Browne's old tutor, Dr. Thomas Lushington, by this time rector of Burnham Westgate, in Norfolk, added his recommendation. This move may not have been unconnected with the fact that, on the 10th of July 1637, Browne was incorporated a doctor of physic at Oxford, having two years earlier taken his degree at the London College of Physicians. Perhaps his reappearance at Pembroke, and renewed intercourse with old friends who lived in

Thither,

Norfolk, led to the invitation to Norwich. at all events, he now proceeded, and immediately took up a professional practice which he continued, with eminent success, until his death forty-five years later.

Mrs.

To close the scanty record of this early portion of Browne's career, it should be said that in 1641 he married Dorothy, the fourth daughter of Edward Mileham, of Burlingham St. Peter. The bride was twenty years of age, the bridegroom thirty-six. This marriage was fortunate to a high degree. Browne 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." So the excellent Whitefoot says, and he had opportunities of observing the couple through the whole of their married life. A few of Dorothy Browne's letters have been preserved; they do greater credit to her sentiments than to her spelling; she liked her "sheus" to be "eythar pinke or blew," and had a partiality for "whight silk" lined with "slit grene sarsanat." She bore ten children, six of whom died before their parents. Save for such bereavements, which were accepted in the seventeenth century with much resignation, the married life of Thomas Browne seems to have been one of unclouded happiness. We leave him prosperously settled in Norwich, "much resorted to for his skill in physic."

CHAPTER II

RELIGIO MEDICI

RELIGIO MEDICI, which to Browne's contemporaries possessed a dangerous savour of scepticism, has come to be considered by us as a work of practical piety. The mind of its author had a curious mixture of directness and tortuousness which disguises from all but the careful reader the singleness of his aim. But those who are persistent in studying the whole of Religio Medici a book far too often treated as if it were a mere storehouse of striking paradoxes-will discover that an unbroken thread runs through it. It lies spread out before us like a smiling champaign, through which, with singular turns and convolutions, undulates a shining river of argument. The casual observer sees the light and the beauty, but there seems to him no current, no fall. Yet, winding as it is, the stream does move, and it descends, with soft regularity, to a goal in the far distance. We must therefore give no excessive attention to Browne's fantastic escapes from the obvious, nor must we be deceived by the caprices of his fancy. His argument, if you give it time and scope, will not lose its way nor miss its appointed aim.

The object of Religio Medici, then, when we lay it down after a careful reading, is seen to be a defence

Xof the attitude of a mind that is scientific and yet reverent. The subject of the treatise is religion as it appears, we may almost say on second thoughts, to an intellect which for a long time past has been concerned exclusively with natural experiment, and which comes back to religion habituated to the experimental attitude. The medicus is a man, physician or surgeon, whose business it is by imbuing the human body with medicines or by performing manual operations on it, to cure the physical ills to which our race is subject. In order that he may learn to be able to do this, he has to give long years of his best attention to material matters, to a close and untiring examination of the bodily structure in health and in disease, to drugs and diet, to a whole circle of experiences which are the reverse of spiritual. The mind of such a medicus, when it is stored with physical knowledge, will revert to a consideration of the supernatural, but in a mood how changed! He knows that his faith has passed through a fiery trial; "my greener studies have been polluted," he confesses, with heresies and errors. are these to hold their power over his soul?

But

Religion, urges the sceptic, is all very well for the childish, for the inexperienced, for the ignorant. But how does it affect you, the instructed, the illuminated, you who come, learned far above your fellows, from discussion over the sources of life and the causes of death in the anatomical theatre of Padua ? Well, replies Browne, in his long-drawn, plausible way, that is exactly what we must find out. We must see how religion stands the test of a return to it after a thorough scientific education. The world, he finds, has persuaded itself that because he has devoted himself so long to

anatomy, he must have no religion. In his smiling candour, he admits that the world has some excuse for its opinion. If he is expected to pull a long face, and blaspheme all cakes and ale; if religion necessitates casting up the whites of one's eyes and denouncing all men whose opinions differ in measure from one's own, and sitting in fierce judgment upon one's neighbours, then Browne has to retire. He has to admit that he does not conform to the Puritan type. His behaviour is indifferent; his discourse speculative; his profession suspected; his studies are physical and free. If religion is incompatible with all this, he must wave his hand to the churches.

But he is determined not to admit this incompatibility; and in his refusal to do so lies his great originality, and the passionate welcome which was at once accorded on so many sides to his book. In an age of theological fury, Browne argued without heat. His was pre-eminently a peaceable spirit. He had no pleasure in controversy for its own sake, and he therefore opens his discourse with a series of statements which are intended to ward off discussion and to rout suspicion. The opening fact of Religio Medici is that its author insists on being styled a Christian. Those who are not for us, our Saviour had said, are against us. Browne, in his subtle way, might have contested the truth of this position, but he declines to do so. He accepts it, and he is with the Christians, not against them. It is very distressing to him that there should be so much internecine strife among those who make the same claim as he. But he looks ahead with a noble foresight, and in spite of the discordant jarring of the sects conceives "that revolution of time