INTRODUCTION. THE author of the "Religio Medici" was born in the City of London, in October of the year 1605, which was the year also of the birth of Edmund Waller, of Sir William Davenant, of William Habington, of Thomas Randolph, and three years before the birth of Milton. He Thomas Browne's father, who had been a draper in Cheshire, died early, leaving nine thousand pounds behind him. His wife, having a third part of that, married again. The son was sent by his guardians to Winchester School, and thence to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he graduated as M.A. in 1629. studied and practised medicine; then travelled; spent some time at the famous medical schools of Montpellier and Padua; graduated as Doctor of Medicine at Leyden; and was admitted to the same degree at Oxford in July, 1637, at the age of thirty-two. Dr. Thomas Browne had settled in England as a physician first at Shipden Hall, near Halifax (where the "Religio Medici was written), but in the year 1637 he went to Norwich. An appetite for acquisition and display of curious learning belonged to the fashion of the time, and was related to the later Euphuism among our poets, in and for some time after the reign of James I. Dr. Thomas Browne, of Norwich, had a genius in this direction. He acquired high local repute as a learned and skilful physician, and he seems to have written, for himself alone, at the age of thirty, soon after his return to England, and before his settlement at Norwich, the eloquent and thoughtful book which he called Religio Medici, the Faith of a Physician. In 1641 Dr. Browne married a lady who survived him. They had twelve children, of whom only one son and three daughters outlived their father. In the year after his marriage, two unauthorised editions of the "Religio Medici were printed from copies made and recopied, and again recopied from recopyings, in the years when the MS. book passed from hand to hand among friends of its author. In 1643, therefore, Dr. Thomas Browne published the book himself, with comment by "A. B." upon some 'Observations published by Sir Kenelm Digby, which were based on the faulty and unauthorised editions of the book. A Latin version, by John Merryweather, published in 1644, extended knowledge of the "Religio Medici foreign readers, and its fame became European. 66 66 to Three years after his own publication of the Religio Medici," Dr. Browne published in folio, in 1646, his Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, Epidemics_of False Doctrine-" Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received Tenets and commonly presumed Truths, which examined, prove but Vulgar and Common Errors." This also attracted wide attention, and confirmed its author's reputation for curious and minute learning. But Thomas Browne had superstitions of his own, such as were general in his time, and could be supported by foundations dug in his own fields of study. Eighteen years afterwards his opinion, calmly given, helped, at Bury St. Edmunds, to bring down upon two poor women, Amy Dunny and Rose Callender, sentence of death for bewitching children. That sentence was passed by Sir Matthew Hale, one of the best of English judges. Other such sentences continued to be passed, until this Vulgar Error went the way of its forefathers, having destroyed its last victims in Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, who were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of soap. Joseph Hall, who became Bishop of Norwich in • 1641, the year of Thomas Browne's marriage, and who in that year was in controversy with Milton on Episcopacy, was one of the most congenial and intimate friends of the learned Norwich physician. Hall was sent to the Tower in December, 1641, with other bishops who had protested against their exclusion from the House of Lords. Six months afterwards, he was released on bail, but deprived of his bishopric; and then he lived a private life upon a farm he had at Heigham, near Norwich, until his death in 1656, when he was an old man of eighty-two, his friend Browne being in attendance on him as physician. Two years later, in 1658, Dr. Browne discussed burial customs with much curious learning, and with depths of thought and feeling in some eloquent passages that place this treatise on "Urn Burial" beside the Religio Medici" among the classics of our English prose. This dissertation was suggested by the digging up of some old sepulchral urns in Norfolk. In the same little book with his "Urn Burial," or "Hydriotaphia," Dr. Browne published "The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial Lozenge," a curious tracing of the number five through Nature. After the Restoration, Dr. Thomas Browne, of Norwich, was enrolled, in 1664, among the Honorary Fellows of the College of Physicians. In September, 1671, when he was sixty-six years old, King Charles II. visited Norwich, and in celebration of that very trifling fact, he wished to knight some principal inhabitant of the town. He therefore offered knighthood to the Mayor. The Mayor declined his offer, and the next greatest man to the Mayor was the learned and affluent physician, Dr. Thomas Browne, who thus became Sir Thomas for the rest of his life-that is to say, from September, 1671, to his death in October, 1682, when he died as Sir Thomas Browne; but during those last eleven years, from the age of sixty-six. to the age of seventy-seven, he wrote no more. Sir Thomas Browne died on his birthday, the 19th of October. Sir Kenelm Digby, whose "Observations" on the "Religio Medici are here appended, was born in 1603, and therefore only two years older than Sir Thomas Browne. He was the son of Sir Everard Digby, who was executed in 1606 for participation in the Gunpowder Plot. Kenelm Digby was educated at Oxford, knighted by James I., and employed in public affairs under Charles I. When twenty-five years old he attacked a Venetian fleet with a squadron raised by himself. When his age was about thirtythree he returned to his father's faith, and joined the communion of the Church of Rome. At the outbreak of Civil War he was imprisoned by the Parliament, but at the time of the appearance of the "Religio Medici " he regained his liberty and went to France. He lived through the Commonwealth time, accepting the rule of Cromwell, and died in 1665. His pleasure in recondite_learning was not accompanied, as in Sir Thomas Browne, with a breath of genius to give it life and warmth. Sir Thomas Browne having asked Sir Kenelm Digby not to print his " Observations until he had read the authorised edition of his book, then about to appear, Sir Kenelm Digby undertook to withhold them, but they were not so withheld. They were not printed, however, with more haste than they were written, for Sir Kenelm said that the reading of the “Religio Medici," and the immediate writing of the "Observations on it, had all been completed within twenty-four hours. H. M. |