embroidered with extraordinary skill. He was more an elaborate literary artist than either a scientist or a philosopher. The Religio Medici begins with a profession of Christian faith "I dare without usurpation assume the honorable style of a Christian." It is a philosophic disquisition on the mysteries of life and death, and the following extract indicates Sir Thomas Browne's line of thought: Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable. For the world, I count it not an inn but an hospital, and a place not to live but to die in. The world that I regard is my self; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I can cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and my fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not only in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us. That mass of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind. That surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot persuade me I have any Whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm, or little world, I find myself something more than the great. There is surely a piece of divinity in us-something that was before the heavens, and owes no homage unto the sun. Nature tells me I am the image of God, as well as Scripture. He that understands not thus much, hath not his introduction or first lesson, and hath yet to begin the alphabet of man. A Difficult Writer Thomas Browne was a difficult writer. Mr. Edmund Gosse has said of him: "Browne was greatly interested in the beauty of words, in their sound, their form, the image that they raised. But his treatment of them was very curious, and is not easily or completely to be justified. There was something ab normal in Browne's intellect, and it is shown in the rather mad way in which he tossed words about." He apologised for writing in English rather than in Latin, and his idea of elegant English was a language full of latinised words only to be understood by readers who are masters of the Latin language. This affectation and his general attitude to life enraged Hazlitt, who wrote of him: "His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and the imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of pasteboard. He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his station in one of the planets." Charles Lamb, however, said that Thomas Browne was one of the worthies "whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their nightgown and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with them." Carlyle said: "The conclusion of the essay on Urn Burial is absolutely beautiful: a still elegiac mood, so soft, so deep, so solemn and tender, like the song of some departed saint flitting faint under the everlasting canopy of night-an echo of deepest meaning from the great and mighty nations of the dead." And Mr. George Saintsbury says of the same essay: A chapter on funeral ceremonials, beliefs in immortality or annihilation and the like follows, and leads up to the ever-memorable finale, beginning, "Now since these dead bones," which has rung in the ears of some eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of English Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo of his word-music. "Time, which antiquates antiquities," will have some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been heard in English before, "ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus." The first edition of Religio Medici was published in 1642. Browne had an obvious influence on the style of Dr. Jonson, who wrote a life of him, and modern critics are taking a new interest in his subtle and beautiful mind. Several of the writers dealt with in this section lived through the Commonwealth and after the Restoration, but they may all be regarded as belonging in essentials to the first half of their century. Charles I was beheaded in 1649. Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector in 1653, and the literary glory of the Cromwellian period and of the entire seventeenth century interest in his subtle and beautiful mind. BIBLIOGRAPHY T. Seccombe and J. W. Allen's The Age of Shakespeare, vol. ii, Drama, in Handbooks of English Literature. Christopher Marlowe's Complete Works, edited by C. F. Tucker-Brooke. Ben Jonson's Plays, 2 vols., in Everyman's Library. Jonson's Conversations with Wm. Drummond, reprinted in Spingarn's Critical Essays of the 17th Century. Jonson's Discoveries, The Temple Classics. Bacon's Essays, 2 vols., edited by Abbott. Bacon's Essays in Everyman's Library. Bacon's Advancement of Learning and the New Atlantis in one vol. in the World's Classics. Herrick's Poems in the World's Classics. Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, The Muses' Library. Poems by George Herbert, ed. by George Herbert Palmer. Sir Thomas Browne's Works, 3 vols., in Bohn's Library. Also the Religio Medici, separately, in Everyman's Library. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is published in 3 vols., in Bohn's Library. VOL. II-6 |