Dr. Johnson says that, “perhaps there is no human being, however hid in the crowd from the observation of his fellow mortals, who if he has leisure and disposition to recollect his own thoughts and actions, will not conclude his life in some sort a miracle, and imagine himself distinguished from all the rest of his species by many discriminations of nature or of fortune.” This remark he makes in relation to what Sir Thomas Brown asserts of the course of his own life, that it was “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.” Now it is not known that any thing extraordinary ever befell him. “The wonders,” says Johnson, “probably were transacted in his own mind: self-love, cooperating with an imagination vigorous and fertile as that of Brown, will find or make objects of astonishment in every man's life.”
What the Philosopher of Norwich considered as miraculous was probably this, that he had escaped from “Pyrrho's maze,” and had never been contaminated in Epicurus' sty; that he had neither striven for place among the “wrangling crew” nor sought to make his way with the sordid herd; that he had not sold himself to the service of Mammon; but in mature years and with deliberate judgement had chosen a calling in which he might continually increase his knowledge and enlarge his views, and entertain a reasonable hope that while he endeavoured to relieve the sufferings of his fellow creatures and discipline his own mind, the labours wherein his life was past would neither be useless to others nor to himself. He might well consider it a miracle of divine mercy that grace had been given him to fulfil the promise made for him at his baptism, and that he had verily and indeed renounced the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. He might indeed take comfort in his “authentic reflections how far he had performed the great intention of his Maker;—whether he had made good the principles of his nature and what he was made to be; what characteristic and special mark he had left to be observable in his generation; whether he had lived to purpose or in vain; and what he had added, acted, or performed, that might considerably speak him a man.”
There were more resemblances between Sir Thomas Brown and the Doctor than Fluellen discovered between Henry of Monmouth and Alexander the Great. Both graduated in the same profession at the same university; and each settled as a practitioner in a provincial town. (Doncaster indeed was an inconsiderable place compared with Norwich; and Brown merely procured his degree at Leyden, which was not in his time, as it was in Daniel Dove's, the best school of physic in Europe.) Both too were Philosophers as well as Physicians, and both were alike speculative in their philosophy and devout. Both were learned men. Sir Thomas Brown might have said of himself with Herbert,
I know the ways of learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of itself, like a good housewife, spun
In laws and policy: what the Stars conspire;
What willing Nature speaks, what forced by fire;
Both the old discoveries, and the new found seas:
The stock and surplus, cause and history:
All these stand open, or I have the keys.
The Doctor could not have said this; he would rather have said,
I am but one who do the world despise
And would my thoughts to some perfection raise,
A wisdom-lover, willing to be wise.1
Yet he was as justly entitled to the appellation of a learned man by his multifarious knowledge, as he was far from pretending to it. There were many things of which he was ignorant, and contented to be ignorant, because the acquirement would not have been worth the cost. Brown would have taken with just confidence a seat at the Banquet of the Philosophers, whereas Dove would have thought himself hardly worthy to gather up the crumbs that fell from their table.
1 LORD STIRLING.
A certain melancholy predominated as much in the constitution of Sir Thomas's mind, as in that of Charles the First, to whom his portrait bears so remarkable a resemblance; and a certain mirth entered as largely into the composition of the Doctor's, as it did into Charles the Second's, to whom in all moral respects no one could be more utterly unlike. The elements have seldom been so happily mixed as they were in the Philosopher of Norwich; he could not have been perfectly homogeneous if a particle of the quintelement had been superadded;—such an ingredient would have marred the harmony of his character: whereas the Philosopher of Doncaster would have been marred without a large portion of it.