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 encyclopædia 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 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?’