"His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof."
Of the lark, he writes:—
"A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music."
Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not common until the first quarter of the next century.
V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician, is best known as the author of three prose works: Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, 1642), Vulgar Errors (1646), and Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658). In imagination and poetic feeling, he has some kinship with the Elizabethans. He says in the Religio Medici:—
"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable… Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas's shoulders… There is surely a piece of divinity in us—something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun."
The Religio Medici, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die in."
Urn Burial, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a prose poet of the "inevitable hour":—
"There is no antidote against the opium of time… The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man… But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal luster, not omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature."
Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ at the evening twilight hour.