Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 6

affinity to
one another that they will always be thought of together. Only, the style
that was already almost too rich for our modern 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.'
* * * * *

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