Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 6

taste in the Religio absolutely cloys and clogs us in the Morals. The opening and the closing sentences of this posthumous treatise will better convey a taste of its strength and sweetness than any estimate or eulogium of mine. 'Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory track, and narrow path of goodness; pursue virtue virtuously: leaven not good actions, nor render virtue disputable. Stain not fair acts with foul intentions; maim not uprightness by halting concomitances, nor circumstantially deprave substantial goodness. Consider whereabout thou art in Cebes' table, or that old philosophical pinax of the life of man: whether thou art yet in the road of uncertainties; whether thou hast yet entered the narrow gate, got up the hill and asperous way which leadeth unto the house of sanity; or taken that purifying potion from the hand of sincere erudition, which may send thee clear and pure away unto a virtuous and happy life.' And having taken his reader up through a virtuous life, Sir Thomas thus parts with him at its close: 'Lastly, if length of days be thy portion, make it not thy expectation. Reckon not upon long life; think every day thy last. And since there is something in us that will still live on, join both lives together, and live in one but for the other. And if any hath been so happy as personally to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasy, exaltation, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow, according to mystical theology, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven: the world is in a manner over, and the earth in ashes unto them.' 'Prose,' says Friswell, 'that with very little transposition, might make verse quite worthy of Shakespeare himself.'
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The Letter to a Friend is an account of the swift and inevitable deathbed of one of Sir Thomas's patients: a young man who died of a deceitful but a galloping consumption. There is enough of old medical observation and opening science in the Letter, as well as of sweet old literature, and still sweeter old religion, to make it a classic to every well-read doctor in the language. 'To be dissolved and to be with Christ was his dying ditty. He esteemed it enough to approach the years of his Saviour, who so ordered His own human state, as not to be old upon earth. 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. 'This unique morsel of literature' as Walter Pater calls it.
The Vulgar Errors, it must be confessed, is neither very inviting, nor very rewarding to ordinary readers nowadays. And that big book will only be persevered in to the end by those readers to whom everything that Sir Thomas Browne has written is of a rare interest and profit. The full title of this now completely antiquated and wholly forgotten treatise is this, 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received Tenets and commonly presumed Truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors.' The First Book of the Pseudodoxia is general and philosophical; the Second Book treats of popular and received tenets concerning mineral and vegetable bodies; the Third, of popular and received tenets concerning animals; the Fourth, of man; the Fifth, of many things questionable as they are commonly described in pictures, etc.; and the Sixth, of popular and received tenets, cosmo-graphical, geographical, and historical; and the Seventh, of popular and received truth, some historical, and some deduced from Holy Scripture. The Introductory Book contains the best analysis and exposition of the famous Baconian Idols that has ever been written. That Book of the Pseudodoxia is full of the profoundest philosophical principles set forth in the stateliest English. The students of Whately and Mill, as well as of Bacon, will greatly enjoy this part of the Pseudodoxia. The Grammar of Assent, also, would seem to have had some of its deepest roots in the same powerful, original, and suggestive Book. For its day the Pseudodoxia is a perfect encyclopaedia of scientific, and historical, and literary, and even Biblical criticism: the Pseudodoxia and the Miscellany Tracts taken together. 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