Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 7

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. For one thing, and that surely not a small thing, we see on every page of the Pseudodoxia the labour, as Dr. Johnson so truly says, that its author was always willing to pay for the truth. And, as Sir Thomas says himself, a work of this nature is not to be performed upon one leg, or without the smell of oil, if it is to be duly and deservedly handled. It must be left to men of learning and of science to say how far Sir Thomas has duly and deservedly handled the immense task he undertook in this book. But I, for one, have read this great treatise with a true pride, in seeing so much hard work so liberally laid out according to the best light allowed its author in that day. As Dr. Johnson has said of it, 'The mistakes that the author committed in the Pseudodoxia were not committed by idleness or negligence, but only for want of the philosophy of Boyle and Newton.' Who, then, will gird up his loins in our enlightened day to give us a new Pseudodoxia after the philosophy of Bacon and Boyle and Newton and Ewald and Darwin? And after Sir Thomas's own philosophy, which he thus sets forth before himself in this and in all his other studies: 'We are not magisterial in opinions, nor have we dictator-like obtruded our conceptions: but, in the humility of inquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them to more ocular discerners. And we shall so far encourage contradiction as to promise no disturbance, or re- oppose any pen, that shall fallaciously or captiously refute us. And shall only take notice of such whose experimental and judicious knowledge shall be employed, not to traduce or extenuate, but to explain and dilucidate, to add and ampliate, according to the laudable custom of the ancients in their sober promotions of learning. Unto whom, notwithstanding, we shall not contentiously rejoin, or only to justify our own, but to applaud or confirm his maturer assertions; and shall confer what is in us unto his name and honour; ready, for our part, to be swallowed up in any worthy enlarger: as having our aid, if any way, or under any name, we may obtain a work, so much desired, and yet desiderated, of truth.' Shall this Association, I wonder, raise up from among its members, such a worthy successor and enlarger of Sir Thomas Browne?
The title, at least, of the _Urn-Burial_ is more familiar to the most of us than that of the Pseudodoxia. It was the chance discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk that furnished Sir Thomas with the occasion to write his Hydriotaphia. And that classical book is only another illustration of his enormous reading, ready memory, and intense interest in everything that touches on the nature of man, and on his beliefs, habits, and hopes in all ages of his existence on this earth. And the eloquence and splendour of this wonderful piece is as arresting to the student of style as its immense information is to the scholar and the antiquarian. 'The conclusion of the essay on Urn-Burial,' says Carlyle, 'is absolutely beautiful: a still elegiac mood, so soft, so deep, so solemn and tender, like the song of some departed saint--an echo of deepest meaning from the great and mighty Nations of the Dead. Sir Thomas Browne must have been a good man.'
The Garden of Cyrus is past all description of mine. 'The Garden of Cyrus must be read. It is an extravagant sport of a scholar of the first rank and a genius of the first water. 'We write no herbal,' he begins, and neither he does. And after the most fantastical prose-poem surely that ever was written, he as fantastically winds up at midnight with this: 'To keep our eyes longer open were but to act our antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' At which Coleridge must incontinently whip out his pencil till we have this note of his on the margin: 'What life! what fancy! what whimsicality! Was ever such a reason given for leaving one's book and going to bed as this, that they are already past their first sleep in Persia, and that the huntsmen are up in America?'
Sir Thomas Browne has had many admirers, and his greatest admirers are to be found among our foremost men. He has had Samuel Johnson among his greatest admirers, and Coleridge, and Carlyle, and Hazlitt, and Lytton, and Walter Pater, and Leslie Stephen, and Professor