The stilted and complimentary, as well as roundabout, epistolary style of those days is well known. Thus, in writing to Mr. Evelyn, he begins: “Worthy Sir,—In obedience unto the commands of my noble friend, Mr. Paston, and the respects I owe unto so worthy a person as yourself,” or again, addressing Dr. Merritt, he commences: “Most honoured Sir,—I take the boldness to salute you as a person of singular worth and learning, and whom I very much respect and honour,” or again, “Honoured Sir,—I am sorry that I have had diversions of such necessity, as to hinder my more sudden salute since I received your last.”
To his sons he writes many letters. In these he addresses his eldest son Edward as “Dear Sonne,” or “Dear Sonne Edward;” but those to his younger son Thomas, always commenced “Honest Tom” or “Tom” only.
Much of his advice to “Honest Tom” is peculiar although essentially sound and practical. Thus he advises him, when a young man in France, in this fashion: “I would be glad you had a good handsome garb of your body, . . . and take up a commendable boldness, without which you will never be fit for anything.” “Live soberly and temperately, the heat of the place (Xaintes) will otherwise mischief you, and keep within in the heat of the day.” “You may stay your stomach with little pastrys some times in cold mornings, for I doubt sea larks will be too dear a collation and drawe too much wine down.”
Again, later on, he writes: “Bee sober and complacent. If you quit periwigs it would be better, and more for your credit.” “Hee that goes to warre must patiently submit unto the various accidents thereof.” And that this “Honest Tom” was a worthy son and a fine English sailor we learn from a passage in another letter to him at a latter period, when a lieutenant of his Majesty’s ship the “Marie Rose.” He writes to his son: “Mr. Scudamore, your sober and learned chaplaine, in your voyage with Sir Jeremie Smith, gives you no small commendations for a sober, studious, courageous, and diligent person; that he had not met with any of the fleet like you, so civile, observing, and diligent to your charge, with the reputation and love of all the shippe; and that without doubt you would make a famous man and a reputation to your country.”
We can only regret that this promising son did not live to fulfil the high expectations formed of him.
Finally reference may be made to a Letter, because stated to have been previously unpublished, which may be found in the “Eastern Counties Collectanea,” in which he exhaustively discusses the nature of a large fish-bone dug up at Cunnington, and which had been sent to him for his opinion upon it.
To sum up—Sir Kenelm Digby writes to Sir T. Browne, of the Religio Medici as “Your excellent piece, . . . of so weighty subjects, and so strongly penned.”
Dr. Johnson says of him “There is no science of which he does not discover some skill; and scarce any kind of knowledge profane or sacred, obstruse or elegant, which he does not appear to have cultivated with success.”
Carlyle says “The conclusion of the essay on urn burial is absolutely beautiful; a still elegiac mood, so soft, so solemn and tender, like the song of some departed saint flitting faint under the everlasting canopy of night—an echo of deepest meaning from the great and mighty nations of the dead. Browne must have been a good man.”
Evelyn, as I have already quoted, writes of him as “That famous scholar and physician.”