Thomas Browne

“ His whole life is to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne,—one perpetual miracle. Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful; from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for food. ”

“ In his rare imagination, Sir Thomas Browne had the original root of a truly refining, ennobling, and sanctifying faith planted in his heart by the hand of Nature herself. No man, indeed, in the nature of things, can be a believing Christian man without imagination. A believing and a heavenly-minded man may have a fine imagination without knowing that he has it. ”

“ Some of the most powerful passages that ever fell from Sir Thomas Browne’s pen are to be come upon in the Introduction to the Pseudodoxia. And, with all our immense advances in method and in discipline: in observation and in discovery: no true student of nature and of man can afford to neglect the extraordinary catalogue of things which are so characteristically treated of in Sir Thomas Browne’s great, if, nowadays, out-grown book. ”

“ Sir Thomas Browne was not made of the hot metal and the stern stuff of John Milton. All through those terrible years Browne lived securely in his laboratory, and in his library, and in his closet. Richard Baxter’s Autobiography is as full of gunpowder as if it had been written in an army-chaplain’s tent, as indeed it was. But both Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and Browne’s Religio Medici might have been written in the Bedford or Norwich of our own peaceful day. All men are not made to be soldiers and statesmen: and it is no man’s duty to attempt to be what he was not made to be. ”

“ Sir Thomas is one of the greatest egotists of literature—to use a necessary but an unpopular and a misleading epithet. Hazlitt has it that there have only been but three perfect, absolute, and unapproached egotists in all literature—Cellini, Montaigne, and Wordsworth. But why that fine critic leaves out Sir p. 23Thomas Browne, I cannot understand or accept. I always turn to Sir Thomas Browne, far more than to either of Hazlitt’s canonised three, when I want to read what a great man has to tell me about himself: and in this case both a great and a good and a Christian man. ”

“ Widely and accurately read in ancient and modern literature, and possessed of numerous accomplishments, Sir Thomas Browne was in society diffident almost to shyness. "His modesty," says Whitefoot, [41] "was visible in a natural habitual blush, which was increased upon the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable cause. Those who knew him only by the briskness of his writings were astonished at his gravity of aspect and countenance, and freedom from loquacity." ”

“ Such a one is Sir Thomas Browne, a naturalist, a philosopher, a scholar, a physician, and a moralist, almost the last of the generation which produced Jeremy Taylor and Shakespeare. No thinker bears stronger witness to the wandering and inventive curiosity of the age. No [Pg 252] writer has better displayed the brilliant and sombre imagination of the North. No one has spoken with a more eloquent emotion of death, the vast night of forgetfulness, of the all-devouring pit, of human vanity, which tries to create an ephemeral immortality out of glory or sculptured stones. ”

“ Let me pass, however, to what may be counted more serious literature. What can one say of Sir Thomas Browne unless indeed one has an hour in which to say it. Every page of that great writer’s Religio Medici and Urn Burial is quotable—full of worldly wisdom and of an inspiration that is not of the world. Browne was born in London, and not until he was thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was p. ”

“ I am a physician, and this is my faith, and my morals, and my whole true and proper life. The scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies, and the indifference of my behaviour and discourse in matters of religion, might persuade the world that I had no religion at all. And yet, in despite of all that, I dare, without usurpation, assume the honourable style of a Christian.’ And if ever any man was a truly catholic Christian, it was surely Sir Thomas Browne. He does not unchurch or ostracise any other man. He does not stand at diameter and sword’s point with any other man ”

“ The truth to Sir Thomas Browne about all revealed religion is this, which he sets forth in a deservedly famous passage:—‘Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in revealed religion for an active faith. I love to lose myself in a mystery, and to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! ’Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection. ”

“ The Religio Medici is a universally recognised English classic. And the Urn-Burial, the Christian Morals, and the Letter to a Friend are all quite worthy to take their stand beside the Religio Medici. Sir Thomas Browne made several other contributions to English literature besides these masterpieces; but it is on the Religio Medici, and on what Sir Thomas himself calls ‘other pieces of affinity thereto,’ that his sure fame as a writer of noble truth and stately English most securely rests. Sir Thomas Browne was a physician of high standing and large practice all his days ”

“ The Sir Thomas Browne of the 'Religio Medici' is by no means to be identified with the everyday flesh-and-blood289 physician of Norwich. He is the ideal and glorified Sir Thomas, and represents rather what ought to have been than what was. We all have such doubles who visit us in our day-dreams and sometimes cheat us into the belief that they are our real selves, but most of us luckily hide the very existence of such phantoms; for few of us, indeed, could make them agreeable to our neighbours. ”

“ No, no!—give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne “Every man truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself.” ”

“ If not infallible the book is full of interest. Any one who cares at all for French literature, and does not mind a little intellectual irritation, will read it both with pleasure and advantage.”
* Gosse, Edmund William. Sir Thomas Browne. **75c. Macmillan.
This volume in the “English men of letters” series, a monograph on Sir Thomas Browne, “bears every sign of care and of minute and skillful investigation. Browne himself is set before us with fullness of detail, his work is analysed with scholarly patience.... Browne was that rare favorite of the gods, a happy man of genius. ”

“ It is not the chisel which keeps a memory alive. An inscription is superfluous for him whose deeds are graven in the book of life. Many another, who has but elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is laid under all the figures of rhetoric, and is beholden to nothing better than an obelisk to speak him fair. "To be but pyramidally extant," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a fallacy in duration." ”

“ He that early arriveth into the parts and prudence of age is happily old without the uncomfortable attendants of it. And ’tis superfluous to live unto grey hairs, when in a precocious temper we anticipate the virtues of them. In brief, he cannot be accounted young who outliveth the old man.’ Let all young medical students have by heart Sir Thomas Browne’s incomparable English, and wisdom, and piety in his Letter to a Friend upon the occasion of the death of his intimate Friend. ”

“ The Author whom I have selected for notice this evening is Sir Thomas Browne, long a resident in this city, for many years a practising physician here; a gentleman who enjoyed the highest reputation even in his own lifetime, as a man of high character and great literary attainments ”

“ He is happily seated who lives in Places whose Air, Earth, and Water, promote not the Infirmities of his weaker Parts, or is early removed into Regions that correct them. He that is tabidly inclined, were unwise to pass his days in Portugal: Cholical Persons will find little Comfort in Austria or Vienna: He that is weak-legg'd must not be in Love with Rome, nor an infirm Head with Venice or Paris. Death hath not only particular Stars in Heaven, but malevolent Places on Earth, which single out our Infirmities, and strike at our weaker Parts ”

“ Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint.
And the struck spirit utterly would faint,
Hurl’d from full joy.”
To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, “whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days.” In another of his works the fine old physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, “think of sullen vicissitudes,” but beat not our brains to foreknow them. “Be armed against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-knowledge. ”

“ I know he is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not; for we behold him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow; our understanding is dimmer than Moses Eye; we are ignorant of the back-parts or lower side of his Divinity; therefore to prie into the maze of his Counsels is not only folly in man, but presumption even in Angels; like us, they are his Servants, not his Senators; he holds no Counsel, but that mystical one of the Trinity, wherein though there be three Persons, there is but one mind that decrees without Contradiction: nor needs he any ”

“ I do not value society—others do: ‘we are all His children’ says Euripides and quotes Paul.
Now, love, let this be a moot point to settle among the flowers one day—with Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘other hard questions yet not impossible to be solved’ (‘What song the Sirens sang to Ulysses,’ is the first!) in which blessed hope let me leave off; for I confess to having written myself all-but-tired, headachy. But ‘vexed with you’! Ba, Ba; you perplex me, bewilder me; let me get right again; kiss me, dearest, and all is right—God bless you ever—
Your R.
[53]
E.B.B. to R.B. Wednesday Evening. ”

“ At the time when this book was published the author resided at Norwich, where he had settled in 1636, by the persuasion of Dr. Lushington, his tutor, who was then rector of Burnham Westgate, in West Norfolk. His practice became very extensive, and in 1637 he was incorporated Doctor of Physic, in Oxford. He married in 1641, Mrs. Mileham, of a good family in Norfolk. He had ten children by her, of whom one son and three daughters survived their parents. In 1646, Sir Thomas Browne published his “Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors,” which passed through many editions. ”

“ How shall the dead arise, is no question of my Faith; to believe only possibilities, is not Faith, but meer Philosophy. Many things are true in Divinity, which are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by sense; and many things in [68] Philosophy confirmable by sense, yet not inducible by reason. Thus it is impossible by any solid or demonstrative reasons to perswade a man to believe the conversion of the Needle to the North; though this be possible and true, and easily credible, upon a single experiment unto the sense. I believe that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite again ”

“ We now lose sight of Captain Browne till the spring of 1806, when he assumed the command of the Tonnant, an 80-gun ship, bearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Eliab Harvey, under whom he served in the Channel fleet till May 1809. He subsequently held an appointment in the Sea Fencibles; and after the dissolution of that corps acted as Flag-Captain to Rear-Admiral T. Byam Martin, in the Aboukir of 74 guns, which ship he commanded during the siege of Riga; on which occasion between 300 and 400 of his crew were daily lent to the gun-boats employed in the defence of that city. ”

“ Browne in early life travelled much and was a voluminous writer; he made many friendships with men celebrated in his day, and his advice and assistance were sought and gratefully acknowledged by Dugdale, Evelyn, Ray and Willughby, Merrett, Sir Robert Paston (afterwards Earl of Yarmouth) , Ashmole, Aubrey, and others; but his general correspondence does not now concern us, my object being to supply in a convenient form what I believe will be acceptable to modern naturalists, namely, an accurate transcript of his notes and letters on the "Natural History of the County of Norfolk." ”

“ But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge; We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves, Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; ”

“ D. 108, fol. 71) , and a draft of a letter from Sir Thomas Browne about a remarkable fly (see ante p. 68 and Note 110) , which offended the cattle extraordinarily, found at Horsey Marshes (MS. Rawl. D. 108, fol. 103) . There is also (MS. Rawl. D. 391, fol. 55) a letter from Sir Hamon le Strange to Sir T. B., dated Jan. 16, 1653. About half this letter is printed by Wilkin, i., pp. 369-70. He [Pg 98] mentions towards the end that he sends certain observations on T. B.'s "Enquiries into Common Errors," at page "27 thereof I write of a whale cast upon my shoare." ”