he means that we too shall "have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch."
How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as verse.
"Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;" "When personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:"--such passages as these, and the whole of the 'Fragment on Mummies,' one can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.
That the 'Religio Medici' was the work of a gentleman before his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, "I have shaken hands with delight [sc. by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days." So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind. Its frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne's: if Montaigne had been graduated after a due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the fluctus decumanus gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would have been closer.
"The 'Religio Medici,'" says Coleridge, "is a fine portrait of a handsome man in his best clothes." There is truth in the criticism, and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden, that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?
This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart "in the still air of delightful studies," is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He thinks his thoughts in his own way, and "the style is the man" never more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions the execution of Charles I. as a "horrid murther," and another speaks of Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the public eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultuous and heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that Shakespeare was of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the parallels in their thought and feeling and in his, were his contemporaries. Constant and extensive as are his excursions into ancient literature, it is rare for him to make any reference to writers of his own time.
Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great names of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries. His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of our modern school:--"What is the use of dew-claws in dogs?" He does not instantly answer, as a schoolboy in this Darwinian day would, "To carry out an analogy;" but the mere asking of the question sets him ahead of his age. See too his curious inquiries into the left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value: "his piece 'De Circul. Sang.,' which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus." And here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur--concerning canine madness, "whether it holdeth not better at second than at first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the evil proves less considerable." He is the first to observe and describe that curious product of the decomposition of flesh known to modern chemists as adipocere.
He is full of eager anticipation of the future. "Join sense unto reason," he cries, "and experiment unto speculation, and so give life unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.... What libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few ages may joyfully declare."
But acute and active as our author's perceptions were, they did not prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to the devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part in the economy of the world. This belief affords so easy a solution of some problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may look back with envy upon those who held it in serene and comfortable possession.
It is to be regretted, however, that the eminent Lord Chief Justice Hale in 1664, presiding at the trial for witchcraft of two women, should have called Dr. Browne, apparently as amicus curiæ, to give his view of the fits which were supposed to be the work of the witches. He was clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more to do with that case than he has with most cases of hysteria; and consequently the witches, it must be said, fared no better in Sir Matthew Hale's court than many of their kind in various parts of Christendom about the same time. But it would be unreasonable for us to hold the ghost of Sir Thomas deeply culpable because, while he showed in most matters an exceptionally enlightened liberality of opinion and practice, in this one particular he declined to deny the scientific dictum of previous ages and the popular belief of his own time.