Oxford, took his degree of master of arts, practised physic in Oxfordshire, travelled into Ireland, thence into France, Italy, and Holland, obtained his doctor's degree at Leyden, and settled as a physician at Shipden Hall, near Halifax. So far there is nothing peculiar in what we know of his history. His record is not in restless actions, but in adventurous and roving thoughts. He wrote a book, and his true history began. This work, entitled Religio Medici (the Religion of a Physician,) lay for several years unknown to the public. The writer professed to consider it but an exercise to himself, "contrived in his private study," and not intended for publication. There is no reason to dispute the assertion. But it was shown to friends-it was transcribed by admirers -and in the seventh or eighth year after its composition, an anonymous and very incorrect edition of it found its way into the press. It attracted, at its first appearance, the attention of the subtlest minds. Sir Kenelm Digby_reviewed it for the satisfaction of my Lord Dorset. The author acknowledged and revised it-edition followed edition-annotators enriched, scholars translated it. Some found the author an Atheist, others a Catholic. Alexander Ross sought to crush it with a hostile reply; Levin Nicol von Moltke, to bury it with notes; Guy Patin speaks of the impression it made in Paris;-confesses the book has gentilles choses, but doubts its orthodoxy, and half regrets the man is alive, "because he may grow worse, not better:" Buddeus reviled all physicians, in wrath at the impiety of the English doctor; while, with greater justice, Conringius fervently wished every theologian was as pious. Thomas Browne, the obscure practitioner, rose at once to a level with the most famous wits, and the most erudite dreamers of the time. In the interval between the composition and the formal publication of this remarkable work, the young physician had married the daughter of a Norfolk gentleman, and settled at Norwich. Four years after its publication appeared the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or "Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors," a work of brilliant learning and consummate ingenuity. Browne's name was now established. Scholars pressed on him their corre

spondence upon subjects the most various; criticisms and encomiums were showered upon his head; and, at last, as a climax or a bathos to his career, he was knighted at Oxford, by Charles the Second.

The most remarkable of Browne's subsequent works are "The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically considered;" and "Hydriotaphia; Urn Burial, or a Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns found in Norfolk." In his miscellaneous tracts, as throughout his whole correspondence, may be found proofs of his grasping and inquisitive mind, his multiform and copious knowledge; but on the four works enumerated, viz.The Religio Medici, the Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, the Garden of Cyrus, and the Urn Burial, rest his fame as a writer of extraordinary powers of thought and language. It is the general characteristics of these writings that we propose briefly to examine.

It seems to us that a principal error of those who have bewildered themselves and their readers in endeavouring to describe and dissect the genius of Browne-who have been so much at a loss to account for its singularities and contradictions, and who have only attempted to seize its subtle spirit in meshes of antithesis and hyperbole— arises from this cause: they have regarded the man apart from his age-they have set him up as a moral curiosity, who thought "that the proper object of speculation was by darkening knowledge to breed speculation," and who "loved to converse chiefly with the spectral apparitions of things"-they have thought (and what is worse, written) of a man living in the seventeenth century as if he were living in our own day-as if he voluntarily adopted the strange errors, and, from irresistible temperament, combined the motley paradoxes they find in him-as if he insisted upon "rounding" every study with a "dream," and losing every fancy in a labyrinth. The result of this view is, that they have represented a very enlightened and studious man as a rare and incomprehensible anomaly that never existed out of Laputa, and had no archetype except in that illustrious philosopher who passed his time extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

But the moment we begin to look around us—to contemplate the literary character of the time-to compare the psychological nature of the man with that of his contemporaries, the mystery dies away; the marvellous fades into sober colours; and Sir Thomas Browne, like most other men of genius, is but an author of great imagination and original habits of thought and study, reflecting back upon us the fantastic light that he received from the influences that gathered and played around him. In the earlier stages of the literature of a nation, the demarcations between prose and poetry are comparatively faint and confused. The prodigal superstitions, the credulous errors, from which men emerge into the dawn of truth, still linger around the footsteps of the hardiest adventurers. They enter the domains of reason guided by the imagination, and carry not only the language, but the temperament of poetry into the severest provinces of prose. Whoever looks into our own early literature will find a strong illustration of this general truth. When, fresh from the giant impulse of the reformation, the intellect of England broke forth under Elizabeth, a variety of causes combined to quicken and exalt the imagination. The defiance of Rome-the discovery of America-the effects of the press-the almost simultaneous burst of the Greek, the Roman, the Italian poetry upon the wonder and emulation of men, born precisely at an age when thought was most broadly and deeply agitated by political circumstances-were not events that tended to divide the poet from the philosopher. On the contrary, no channel of research, however guarded and fenced about, could resist the rush of the great deeps, so universally broken up. Poetry flowed into every course, and sparkled upon every wave, in which men could launch what Bacon has so nobly called the "ships of time." The Greek and Italian authors exercised to the utmost the strength of the language to find adequate translation for their unfamiliar beauties-a profusion of new words and new combinations was the result of the new ideas-the nervous and concise Saxon style became gorgeous with foreign riches, while its periods grew long and stately to the swell of a borrowed music, and, oppressed with their

own triumphs, marched, laden and encumbered, amidst 'the spoils of nations. Whoever turns from Chaucer and his earlier successors to the literature of Elizabeth and James, will see how completely the revolution, produced in great measure by translations, had changed the genius of the language from the simple to the splendid. The wonderful translation of the Bible familiarized the ear to, and coloured the language with, the expressions of the east. The reformation was our Pisistratus—the translation of the Bible was our Homer. A new inspiration and a new audience were produced; for the most popular book in England was the most glorious poetry in the world.

To the sacred volume, which, in a form at once popular yet sublime, was brought home to every man's breast, succeeded the marvels of classical invention. The gigantic images of Homer-the royal majesty of Virgil-were contrasted, or wildly amalgamated, with the chivalrous grotesque of Ariosto, the adventures of Tancred, the enchanted gardens of Armida. Even in history-the boasted province of fact, the fictitious embellishment was the first imparted to the popular mind of England; and the romances of Plutarch were cherished and admired long before our ancestors appreciated the grave profundity of Thucydides the tragic epigram of Tacitus.

These importations were hailed with the delight of novel impressions. Of acquisitions so important a scholar could not but parade his knowledge; quotations, and allusions, and authorities crowded his pages and guided his conclusions. He did not only quote his authors, he believed in them. He supported an axiom out of Plutarch or Ælian. If he could have written a treatise upon the doctrine that two and two make four, he would have been enchanted to find a passage in Ovid's Metamorphoses to authorize the proposition. What coloured his thoughts animated his style. Living amidst poetry, its soil clung to his steps whenever he walked abroad. His disquisitions required but rhyme to become poems. To say nothing of the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney, the exceeding popularity of which attests the taste of those scholastic coteries that then constituted "THE PUBLIC,"

we have only to open the "Advancement of Learning," to see how the attic bees clustered above the cradle of the new philosophy. Poetry pervaded the thoughts, it inspired the similes, it hymned in the majestic sentences of "the wisest of mankind." A very masculine sensea very observant and inductive mind, in Bacon, prevented the imagination getting the better of the reason; and to those natural gifts must be added the sobering effect of an early entrance into life-the dry pursuits of law and politics-and a vast practical knowledge of mankind. But the sense of Bacon was not exempt from the prejudices, any more than his style was devoid of the poetry of the time. He who wrote the Novum Organum did not disbelieve in witchcraft. In fact, as some kings have transmitted to posterity, in their single person, the image and representative of all that is glorious in an age, so James the First, not as a monarch but a student, embodied all of his own time-except the glory; he had the learning and the pedantry-he had not the genius; he had an unlimited credulity, and an insatiable appetite for the marvellous; he had the notion that in apophthegms, and aphorisms, and historical fables, and poetical maxims lay the craft of government, and the philosophy of experience; he quoted all the Latin he could remember; and he believed unhesitatingly in ghosts and witches. All these were not the peculiarities of James I.; they were the characteristics of the great bulk of English scholars in his time. It was reserved for a vicious and degenerate period to correct the literary faults of a virtuous and a great one. There are two cures to the errors that belong to superstition; one is the influence of an experimental philosophy, another is that of a gay and polite scepticism. Perhaps the wit and ease, the profligacy and insouciance of the court of Charles II. did as much as causes more solemn and acknowledged, to counteract the old Gothic superstition; and the light hand of court poets and court freethinkers brushed away from the page of philosopher and poet the clinging devotion of the old belief, and the gorgeous pedantry of the old expressions. The short and clear succinctness of the French diction began to break up the colossal sentences of the earlier

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