English. The petulant and lively spirit of French disquisition began to undermine the bastions and outworks, with which men had fenced round the citadels of their faith. Time, in its usual progress, and the mighty events of the civil war, had raised up new generations of thoughtful and anxious men; who, by combining research with practical ends, took philosophy out of the fairy meads in which, with dreams peopling every tree, she had so long wandered. To a small and scholastic, well-born and accomplished tribunal of readers, succeeded a large, and miscellaneous, and sturdy public. A popular style, and popular subjects, were necessary to ensure popular favour; gradually our literature lost its euphuism, and went back to something of its Saxon origin. It was not for gallant and graceful nobles, intoxicated with the Italian Helicon, and "enamelling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold,"* neither was it for clerkly and enthusiastic students, making their memory the museum for all antiquities, that Locke wove his plain and unembellished periods. It was in the wide circle of a stern and a practical public that he found space to wield the iron flail that demolished those stately and glittering errors, which, in a preceding generation, were the idols of the wise. But, while a growing people became the audience of the philosopher, who shall say how far a licentious court, with which nothing was too sacred for a jest, prepared the way for his opinions. The Rochesters were the pioneers of the Lockes.

But it was before this second revolution began—it was while, indeed, the fashion of composition, at once pedantic and poetical, which characterised the reign of James, was daily growing more pedantic and more poetical under that of his unfortunate son, till it found its euthanasia amidst the Latin flowers with which Milton crowned and buried it, that Sir Thomas Browne received his intellectual education and lavished its fruits. Though he lived on amidst the wits and freethinkers of the time of Charles II., "he wore the cloke and bootes" of the old style. He probably read little of the works of his

* Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.

younger contemporaries; for in his correspondence he scarcely observes upon what made the current literature of his day. Even Hudibras-the opinions, the learning, the humour of which must have been delightful to his taste-appears only to draw from him an erudite comment upon the antiquity of burlesque poems.* He seems more at home with Hipponactes than with Samuel Butler. He continued to the last to live apart and aloof, among his ancient authors, and his quaint but sublime thoughts; a scholar by habit, a philosopher by boast, and a poet by nature.

Viewing Browne, then, in this light, associated with such of his contemporaries as were similarly educated, placed, and influenced, the more startling contradictions in his intellectual character are easily solved. It is true, that with a luminous understanding, and a cautious and, in some respects, sceptical mind, he believed in witchcraft. But so did others, with even broader views and acuter comprehension. Bacon, but little his senior in time, and far less inclined by temper to revere ancient belief erroneously propped on scriptural authorities, was no wiser upon this point. The marvellous so largely entered into the temperament of every scholar, that if checked in one channel, it was sure to cast its humours through another. Sir Kenelm Digby, who gravely argues against astrology, believed the wonderful effects of sympathetic powders-is respectfully doubtful of chiromancy-but persuaded that "at the approach of the murderer, the slain body suddenly bleeds again." If, when asked by "My Lord Chief Baron," whether the fits of an old woman were from disease or the Devil, Sir Thomas Browne answered, that "they were heightened by the Devil co-operating with the malice of the witches," we are not to find his excuse in Dr. Aiken's slovenly dogma, that in his mind "fancy and feeling were predominant over judgment," nor to adopt all the fantastic apologies of pseudo-metaphysical admirers. His excuse was in the trial itself—in a Lord Chief Baron (who, much more a man of the world than the studious physi

* See Works, Vol. IV., 253.

cian, should have been a much deeper philosopher in such a case) putting the question, and summing the evidence-in a jury of twelve men finding a verdict of guilty. There was nothing in Browne's genius nor in his studies-we do not say that should have rendered him wiser than Bacon-but wiser than twelve Englishmen, with a Lord Chief Baron to boot, upon a matter of witchcraft, then almost a matter of religion. Nay, his very learning only plunged him deeper into error; since it supplied his memory with all past instances of witchcraft, sacred and profane, and even assured him "there had been a great discovery of witches lately in Denmark!" Still less can we wonder at the Knight's leaning towards astrology; or (with Newton, equally cautious as bold, in our recollection) at an amusing curiosity about the philosophers' stone. The truth of the saying of Luther, that the human mind is like a drunken peasant on horseback-set him up on one side and he falls on the other," is startingly visible, if applied to the giants of the past when examined by the merest pigmies of the present. The great men who have lived before us have lighted us from their knowledge to a survey of their follies. While we breathe and move, while we imagine and invent, we ourselves are laying up new stores for the ridicule of posterity. Who knows but what the present struggle against the principle known to all other states, that the majority of a people should have an interest in the church for which they pay-who knows but what that struggle, which divides a senate, and menaces a constitution, may seem hereafter as great an absurdity as the trial of an old woman for witchcraft? And who knows whether the denial of that principle, with all the immorality, and wrath, and violence, and bloodshed it occasions, may not appear as barbarous a profanation of religion, and as grievous a blot on humanity? Tithes are in the Bible, but so are witches. Piety demanded once a Rathcormac for women who rode on broomsticks -piety demands a Rathcormac now for Catholics who refuse to pay tithes. The law was the law in both: the gospel in both the pretext; perhaps in both our descendants may find the true apology in THE TIME!

. Like his contemporaries, Browne's thoughts were strongly steeped in a passion for the marvellous and recondite; like his contemporaries, he was a reverent and enthusiastic scholar; and with his contemporaries he shared also the redundant periods-the florid dictionthe exuberant poetry, which were thought to give classic beauty and importance to prose. How much in these latter attributes he resembles the greatest of his coevals may be seen on comparison with Jeremy Taylor and Milton.

When all that belongs to poetry, except the rhythm, glowed from the sober pulpit, or found its melodious way into the ungenial and angry elements of political dispute, or theological dissertation, there is no reason why critics should be so amazed to behold it bright and living in the pages of enthusiastic reverie, or ideal contemplation. This poetical spirit pervaded the reasoning, as well as the expressions, of the writers of that time. When Jeremy Taylor wishes to prove the insensible progress of "a man's life and reason," he does not set about it by a syllogism, but a picture. He is not contented with a simple illustration-he raises up an elaborate landscape. "As when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and, by and by, gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked the brow of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God, and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers; even so is a man's reason and his life!"

It is in the same poetical spirit of painting thoughts, that Browne often conveys to us his meaning. Thus, at the close of his "Garden of Cyrus," wishing to denote that it is late, he tells us that the Hyades (the Quincunx of Heaven) run low-that "we are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep— VOL. II.-3

that to keep our eyes open longer were but to act our antipodes that the huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia." On this Coleridge exclaims, "Was there ever such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight? to wit, that if we did not, we should be acting the part of our antipodes!" Begging pardon of "the old man eloquent," we should say that Browne did not conjure up these images for the cold purpose of "giving a reason. He was not arguing upon the matter-he was delighting himself, as he sought to delight the reader, by such vivid and rich associations and shapes, as the idea of sleep and midnight could evoke. He was not writing as a logician-but a poet; and so far from being alone and peculiar in this mode of expression, reasons (if so they are to be called) equally far-fetched and exuberant, as applied to some simple proposition, may be found in abundance, not only in the purple eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, but the complacent dissertations of Sir Kenelm Digby, and even in the interminable prosings of Alexander Ross. Literature was still in that stage when things were presented to the eye, not in the brevity of words, but in the life of pictures. The arts of composition resembled even less the Egyptian hyeroglyph than the Mexican painting.

In Browne, the scholar and the sage could never subdue the poet. He felt this himself. He was often conscious that, as the poet, he said many things which he could not gravely defend as a philosopher. Thus, in the advertisement prefixed to the Religio Medici, he warns the reader, that "there are many things delivered rhetorically-many expressions therein merely tropical; and therefore, also, there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason." We believe that this warning, prefixed to the Religio Medici, is applicable, though in a less degree, to all the works of the author; and that hence many of his critics have confounded the fantastic embellishment, the wild conjecture, or the quaint and sweet perversity of a sportive genius, with the assertions of grave and positive belief. Thus, our author did not conceive