'In fire, air, flood, or underground,'
or to try to penetrate the secret of
'Every star that heaven doth show,
And every herb that sips the dew,'
by reading all the nonsense that had been written about them in the dawn of inquiry. He should be read in a corresponding spirit. One should often stop to appreciate the full flavour of some quaint allusion, or lay down the book to follow out some diverging line of thought. So read in a retired study, or beneath the dusty shelves of an ancient library, a page of Sir Thomas seems to revive the echoes as of ancient chants in college chapels, strangely blended with the sonorous perorations of professors in the neighbouring schools, so that the interferences sometimes produce a note of gentle mockery and sometimes heighten solemnity by quaintness.
That, however, is not the spirit in which books are often read in these days. We have an appetite for useful information, and an appetite for frivolous sentiment or purely poetical musing. We cannot combine the two after the quaint fashion of the old physician. And therefore these charming writings have ceased to suit our modern taste; and Sir Thomas is already passing under that shadow of mortality which obscures all, even the greatest, reputations, and with which no one has dwelt more pathetically or graphically than himself.
If we are disposed to complain, Sir Thomas shall himself supply the answer, in a passage from the 'Hydriotaphia,' which, though described by Hallam as the best written of his treatises, is not to my taste so attractive as the 'Religio Medici.' The concluding chapter, however, is in his best style, and here are some of his reflections on posthumous fame. The end of the world, he says, is approaching, and 'Charles V. can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector.' 'And, therefore, restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories with present considerations seems a vanity out of date, and a superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live as long in our names as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion to the other. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We, whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted into thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment.'
If the argument has now been vulgarised in the hands of Dr. Cumming and his like, the language and the sentiment are worthy of any of our greatest masters.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Ross, for example, urges that the invisibility of the phœnix is sufficiently accounted for by the natural desire of a unique animal to keep out of harm's way.
[6] Mr. Lowell, in 'Shakspeare Once More,' 'Among My Books.'