When Sir Thomas Browne, in the last decade of his life, was asked to
furnish data for the writing of his memoirs in Wood's 'Athenæ
Oxonienses,' he gave in a letter to his friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest
words his birthplace and the places of his education, his admission as
"Socius Honorarius of the College of Physitians in London," the date of
his being knighted, and the titles of the four books or tracts which he
had printed; and ended with "Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be
published."
This account of himself, curter than many an epitaph, and scantier in
details than the requirements of a census-taker's blank, may serve, with
many other signs that one finds scattered among the pages of this
author, to show his rare modesty and effacement of his physical self. He
seems, like some other thoughtful and sensitive natures before and
since, averse or at least indifferent to being put on record as an
eating, digesting, sleeping, and clothes-wearing animal, of that species
of which his contemporary Sir Samuel Pepys stands as the classical
instance, and which the newspaper interviewer of our own day--that
"fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judgment"--has trained to the
most noxious degree of offensiveness.
[Illustration: SIR THOMAS BROWNE]
Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select
company--"fit audience though few"--who are students of the 'Religio
Medici' to a close intimacy with his highest mental processes and
conditions, his "separable accidents," affairs of assimilation and
secretion as one may say, were business between himself and his grocer
and tailor, his cook and his laundress.
The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 produced the
completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the literary remains
of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources--his own note-books,
domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions of contemporary writers
and the works of subsequent biographers--all that we are likely, this
side of Paradise, to know of this great scholar and admirable man.
The main facts of his life are as follows. He was born in the Parish of
St. Michael's Cheap, in London, on the 19th of October, 1605 (the year
of the Gunpowder Plot). His father, as is apologetically admitted by a
granddaughter, Mrs. Littleton, "was a tradesman, a mercer, though a
gentleman of a good family in Cheshire" (_generosa familia_, says Sir
Thomas's own epitaph). That he was the parent of his son's temperament,
a devout man with a leaning toward mysticism in religion, is shown by
the charming story Mrs. Littleton tells of him, exhibiting traits worthy
of the best ages of faith, and more to be expected in the father of a
mediæval saint than in a prosperous Cheapside mercer, whose son was to
be one of the most learned and philosophical physicians of the age of
Harvey and Sydenham:--"His father used to open his breast when he was
asleep and kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father,
that the Holy Ghost would take possession there." Clearly, it was with
reverent memory of this good man that Sir Thomas, near the close of his
own long life, wrote:--"Among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up
one hand unto heaven that thou wert born of honest parents; that
modesty, humility, patience, and veracity lay in the same egg and came
into the world with thee."
This loving father, of whom one would fain know more, died in the early
childhood of his son Thomas. He left a handsome estate of £9,000, and a
widow not wholly inconsolable with her third portion and a not unduly
deferred second marriage to a titled gentleman, Sir Thomas Button,--a
knight so scantily and at the same time so variously described, as "a
worthy person who had great places," and "a bad member" of "mutinous and
unworthy carriage," that one is content to leave him as a problematical
character.
The boy Thomas Browne being left to the care of guardians, his estate
was despoiled, though to what extent does not appear; nor can it be
considered greatly deplorable, since it did not prevent his early
schooling at that ancient and noble foundation of Winchester, nor in
1623 his entrance into Pembroke College, Oxford, and in due course his
graduation in 1626 as bachelor of arts. With what special assistance or
direction he began his studies in medical science, cannot now be
ascertained; but after taking his degree of master of arts in 1629, he
practiced physic for about two years in some uncertain place in
Oxfordshire. He then began a course of travel, unusually extensive for
that day. His stepfather upon occasion of his official duties under the
government "shewed him all Ireland in some visitation of the forts and
castles." It is improbable that Ireland at that time long detained a
traveler essentially literary in his tastes. Browne betook himself to
France and Italy, where he appears to have spent about two years,
residing at Montpellier and Padua, then great centres of medical
learning, with students drawn from most parts of Christendom. Returning
homeward through Holland, he received the degree of doctor of medicine
from the University of Leyden in 1633, and settled in practice at
Halifax, England.
At this time--favored probably by the leisure which largely attends the
beginning of a medical career, but which is rarely so laudably or
productively employed,--he wrote the treatise 'Religio Medici,' which
more than any other of his works has established his fame and won the
affectionate admiration of thoughtful readers. This production was not
printed until seven years later, although some unauthorized manuscript
copies, more or less faulty, were in circulation. When in 1642 "it
arrived in a most depraved copy at the press," Browne felt it necessary
to vindicate himself by publishing a correct edition, although, he
protests, its original "intention was not publick: and being a private
exercise directed to myself, what is delivered therein was rather a
memorial unto me than an example or rule unto any other."
In 1636 he removed to Norwich and permanently established himself there
in the practice of physic. There in 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham, a
lady of good family in Norfolk; thereby not only improving his social
connections, but securing a wife "of such symmetrical proportion to her
worthy husband both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed
to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." Such at least was the
view of an intimate friend of more than forty years, Rev. John
Whitefoot, in the 'Minutes' which, at the request of the widow, he drew
up after Sir Thomas's death, and which contain the most that is known of
his personal appearance and manners. Evidently the marriage was a happy
one for forty-one years, when the Lady Dorothy was left _mæstissima
conjux_, as her husband's stately epitaph, rich with many an _issimus_,
declares. Twelve children were born of it; and though only four of them
survived their parents, such mortality in carefully tended and
well-circumstanced families was less remarkable than it would be now,
when two centuries more of progress in medical science have added
security and length to human life.
The good mother--had she not endeared herself to the modern reader by
the affectionate gentleness and the quaint glimpses of domestic life
that her family letters reveal--would be irresistible by the ingeniously
bad spelling in which she reveled, transgressing even the wide limits
then allowed to feminine heterography.
It is noteworthy that Dr. Browne's professional prosperity was not
impaired by the suspicion which early attached to him, and soon
deepened into conviction, that he was addicted to literary pursuits. He
was in high repute as a physician. His practice was extensive, and he
was diligent in it, as also in those works of literature and scientific
investigation which occupied all "snatches of time," he says, "as
medical vacations and the fruitless importunity of uroscopy would
permit." His large family was liberally reared; his hospitality and his
charities were ample.
In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose of all
his productions: the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar
and Common Errors' the work evidently of the _horæ subsecivæ_ of many
years. In 1658 he gave to the public two smaller but important and most
characteristic works, 'Hydriotaphia' and 'The Garden of Cyrus.' Beside
these publications he left many manuscripts which appeared posthumously;
the most important of them, for its size and general interest, being
'Christian Morals.'
When Sir Thomas's long life drew to its close, it was with all the
blessings "which should accompany old age." His domestic life had been
one of felicity. His eldest and only surviving son, Edward Browne, had
become a scholar after his father's own heart; and though not inheriting
his genius, was already renowned in London, one of the physicians to the
King, and in a way to become, as afterward he did, President of the
College of Physicians. All his daughters who had attained womanhood had
been well married. He lived in the society of the honorable and learned,
and had received from the King the honor of knighthood[1].
[Footnote 1: As for this business of the knighting, one hesitates fully
to adopt Dr. Johnson's remark that Charles II. "had skill to discover
excellence and virtue to reward it, at least with such honorary
distinctions as cost him nothing." A candid observer of the walk and
conversation of this illustrious monarch finds room for doubt that he
was an attentive reader or consistent admirer of the 'Religio Medici,'
or 'Christian Morals'; and though his own personal history might have
contributed much to a complete catalogue of Vulgar Errors, Browne's
treatise so named did not include divagations from common decency in its
scope, and so may have failed to impress the royal mind. The fact is
that the King on his visit to Norwich, looking about for somebody to
knight, intended, as usual on such occasions, to confer the title on the
mayor of the city; but this functionary,--some brewer or grocer perhaps,
of whom nothing else than this incident is recorded,--declined the
honor, whereupon the gap was stopped with Dr. Browne.]
Mr. John Evelyn, carrying out a long and cherished plan of seeing one
whom he had known and admired by his writings, visited him at Norwich in
1671. He found Sir Thomas among fit surroundings, "his whole house and
garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities, and that of the best
collections, especially medails, books, plants, and natural things[2]."
Here we have the right background and accessories for Whitefoot's
portrait of the central figure:--
"His complexion and hair ... answerable to his name, his
stature moderate, and habit of body neither fat nor lean but
[Greek: eusarkos;] ... never seen to be transported with
mirth or dejected with sadness; always cheerful, but rarely
merry at any sensible rate; seldom heard to break a jest, and
when he did, ... apt to blush at the levity of it: his
gravity was natural without affectation. His modesty ...
visible in a natural habitual blush, which was increased upon
the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable
cause.... So free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that
he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse;
though when he was so, it was always singular and never trite
or vulgar."
[Footnote 2: These two distinguished authors were of congenial tastes,
and both cultivated the same Latinistic literary diction. Their meeting
must have occasioned a copious effusion of those "long-tailed words in
osity and ation" which both had so readily at command or made to order.
It is regrettable that Evelyn never completed a work entitled 'Elysium
Brittannicum' which he planned, and to which Browne contributed a
chapter 'Of Coronary Plants.' It would have taken rank with its author's
'Sylva' among English classics.]
A man of character so lofty and self-contained might be expected to
leave a life so long, honorable, and beneficent with becoming dignity.
Sir Thomas's last sickness, a brief but very painful one, was "endured
with exemplary patience founded upon the Christian philosophy," and
"with a meek, rational, and religious courage," much to the edification
of his friend Whitefoot. One may see even a kind of felicity in his
death, falling exactly on the completion of his seventy-seventh year.
He was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where his monument
still claims regard as chief among the _memorabilia_ of that noble
sanctuary[3].
[Footnote 3: In the course of repairs, "in August, 1840, his coffin was
broken open by a pickaxe; the bones were found in good preservation, the
fine auburn hair had not lost its freshness." It is painful to relate
that the cranium was removed and placed in the pathological museum of
the Norwich Hospital, labeled as "the gift of" some person (name not
recalled), whose own cranium is probably an object of interest solely to
its present proprietor. "Who knows the fate of his own bones? ... We
insult not over their ashes," says Sir Thomas. The curator of the museum
feels that he has a clever joke on the dead man, when with a grin he
points to a label bearing these words from the 'Hydriotaphia':--"To be
knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and
our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are
tragical abominations escaped in burning burials."]
At the first appearance of Browne's several publications, they attracted
that attention from the learned and thoughtful which they have ever
since retained. The 'Religio Medici' was soon translated into several
modern languages as well as into Latin, and became the subject of
curiously diverse criticism. The book received the distinction of a
place in the Roman 'Index Expurgatorius,' while from various points of
view its author was regarded as a Romanist, an atheist, a deist, a
pantheist, and as bearing the number 666 somewhere about him.
A worthy Quaker, a fellow-townsman, was so impressed by his tone of
quietistic mysticism that he felt sure the philosophic doctor was guided
by "the inward light," and wrote, sending a godly book, and proposing to
clinch his conversion in a personal interview. Such are the perils that
environ the man who not only repeats a creed in sincerity, but ventures
to do and to utter his own thinking about it.
From Browne's own day to the present time his critics and commentators
have been numerous and distinguished; one of the most renowned among
them being Dr. Johnson, whose life of the author, prefixed to an edition
of the 'Christian Morals' in 1756, is a fine specimen of that facile and
effective hack-work of which Johnson was master. In that characteristic
way of his, half of patronage, half of reproof, and wholly pedagogical,
he summons his subject to the bar of his dialectics, and according to
his lights administers justice. He admits that Browne has "great
excellencies" and "uncommon sentiments," and that his scholarship and
science are admirable, but strongly condemns his style: "It is vigorous,
but rugged; it is learned, but pedantic; it is deep, but obscure; it
strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure; his
tropes are harsh and his combinations uncouth."
Behemoth prescribing rules of locomotion to the swan! By how much would
English letters have been the poorer if Browne had learned his art
of Johnson!
Notwithstanding such objurgations, some have supposed that the style of
Johnson, perhaps without conscious intent, was founded upon that of
Browne. A tone of oracular authority, an academic Latinism sometimes
disregarding the limitations of the unlearned reader, an elaborate
balancing of antitheses in the same period,--these are qualities which
the two writers have in common. But the resemblance, such as it is, is
skin-deep. Johnson is a polemic by nature, and at his best cogent and
triumphant in argument. His thought is carefully kept level with the
apprehension of the ordinary reader, while arrayed in a verbal pomp
simulating the expression of something weighty and profound. Browne is
intuitive and ever averse to controversy, feeling, as he exquisitely
says, that "many have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain
as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just
possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender."
Calmly philosophic, he writes for kindred minds, and his concepts
satisfying his own intellect, he delivers them with as little passion as
an Æolian harp answering the wind, and lingers not for applause or
explanation. His being
"Those thoughts that wander through eternity,"
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.
The mental attitude of reverent belief in its symbolic value, in which
this devout philosopher contemplated the material world, is that of many
of those who have since helped most to build the structure of Natural
Science. The rapturous exclamation of Linnæus, "My God, I think thy
thoughts after thee!" comes like an antiphonal response by "the man of
flowers" to these passages in the 'Religio Medici':--"This visible world
is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are
not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real
substance in that invisible fabric." "Things are really true as they
correspond unto God's conception; and have so much verity as they hold
of conformity unto that intellect, in whose idea they had their first
determinations."
[Illustration: Signature: Fr's. Bacon]