the river Nilus; gipsies; Methuselah; the food of John the Baptist; the cessation of oracles; Friar Bacon's brazen head that spoke; the poverty of Belisarius; and the wish of Philoxenus to have the neck of a crane. In 1658, Browne published his Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial; a Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk, a work not inferior, in ideality of style, to the Religio Medici.' Here the author's learning appears in the details which he gives concerning the modes in which the bodies of the dead have been disposed of in different ages and countries; while his reflections on death, oblivion, and immortality, are, for solemnity and grandeur, probably unsurpassed in English literature. The occasion would hardly have called forth a work from any less meditative mind. In a field at Walsingham were dug up between forty and fifty urns, containing the remains of human bones, some small brass instruments, boxes, and other fragmentary relics. Coals and burnt substances were found near the same plot of ground, and hence it was conjectured that this was the Ustrina, or place of burning, or the spot whereon the Druidical sacrifices were made. Furnished with a theme for his philosophic musings, Sir Thomas Browne then comments on that vast charnel-house, the earth.

their tombs, the Romans affected the rose, the Greeks amaranthus and myrtle; that the funeral pyre consisted of sweet fuel, cypress, fir, larix, yew, and trees perpetually verdant, lay silent expressions of their surviving hopes; wherein Christians, which deck their coffins with bays, have found a more elegant emblem-for that it seeming dead, will restore itself from the root, and its dry and exsuccous leaves resume their verdure again; which, if we mistake not, we have also observed in furze. Whether the planting of yew in churchyards hold not its original from ancient funeral rites, or as an emblem of resurrection, from its perpetual verdure, may also admit conjecture.' Among the beauties of expression in Browne, may be quoted the following eloquent definition: Nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature-they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In belief, all things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.' This seems the essence of true philosophy. To the Hydriotaphia' is appended a small treatise, called The Garden of Cyrus; or the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, and Mystically Considered. This is written in a similar style, and displays much of the author's whimsical fancy and propensity to laborious trifling. One of the most striking of these fancies has been often quoted. Wishing to denote that it is late, or that he was writing at a late hour, he says that the Hyades (the quincunx of heaven) run low-that we are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep-that to keep our eyes open longer were but to act our antipodes-that the huntsmen are up in Americaand that they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' This is fantastic, but it is the offspring of genius. Browne lived in a world of ideal contemreveries, he had stored his mind with vast and multifarious learning. In presenting its results to the public, he painted to the eye and imagination more than he conveyed to the understanding. Among his posthumous pieces is a collection of aphorisms, entitled Christian Morals, to which Dr Johnson prefixed a life of the author. He left, also, various essays, on antiquarian and other subjects. Sir Thomas Browne died in 1682, at the age of seventy-seven. He was of a modest and cheerful disposition, retiring in his habits, and sympathised little with the pursuits and feelings of the busy multitude. His opinions were, in some respects, tinged with the credulity of his age. He believed in witchcraft, apparitions, and diabolical illusions; and gravely observes, that to those who would attempt to teach animals the art of speech, the dogs and cats that usually speak unto witches may afford some encouragement.'

'Nature,' he says, hath furnished one part of the earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in urns, coins, and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great antiquity, America, lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us. Though, if Adam were made out of an extract of the earth, all parts might challenge a restitution, yet few have returned their bones far lower than they might receive them; not affecting the graves of giants, under hilly and heavy cover-plation, but before surrendering himself up to his ings, but content with less than their own depth, have wished their bones might lie soft, and the earth be light upon them; even such as hope to rise again would not be content with central interment, or so desperately to place their relics as to lie beyond discovery, and in no way to be seen again; which happy contrivance hath made communication with our forefathers, and left unto our view some parts which they never beheld themselves.'

He then successively describes and comments upon the different modes of interment and decomposition-whether by fire (some apprehending a purifying virtue in fire, refining the grosser commixture, and firing out the ethereal particles so deeply immersed in it'); by making their graves in the air, like the Scythians, who swore by wind and sword;' or in the sea, like some of the nations about Egypt. 'Men,' he finely remarks, have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs; and since the religion of one seems madness unto another, to afford an account or rational of old rights, requires no rigid reader. That they kindled the pyre aversely, or turning their face from it, was a handsome symbol of unwilling ministration; that they washed their bones with wine and milk; that the mother wrapt them in linen and dried them in her bosom, the first fostering part, and place of their nourishment; that they opened their eyes towards heaven, before they kindled the fire, as the place of their hopes or original, were no improper ceremonies. Their last valediction, thrice uttered by the attendants, was also very solemn, and somewhat answered by Christians, who thought it too little if they threw not the earth thrice upon the interred body. That, in strewing

In the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, the practice of employing Latin words with English terminations is carried to such excess, that, to persons acquainted only with their native tongue, many of his sentences must be nearly unintelligible. Thus, speaking in his 'Vulgar Errors' of the nature of ice, he says: Ice is only water congealed by the frigidity of the air, whereby it acquireth no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its diffluency, and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth there anything properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity; for the determination of quicksilver is properly fixation, that of milk coagulation, and that of oil and unctious bodies only incrassation.' He uses abundantly such words as dilucidate, ampliate, manu

duction, indigitate, reminiscential evocation, farraginous, advenient, ariolation, lapifidical.

as some have done in their persons; one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. It is too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations, in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We, whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that is past a moment.

Those who are acquainted with Dr Johnson's style, will at once perceive the resemblance, particularly in respect to the abundance of Latin words, which it bears to that of Sir Thomas Browne. Indeed there can be no doubt that the author of the Rambler' acquired much of his fondness for pompous and sounding expressions from the writings of the learned knight of Norwich. Coleridge, who was so well qualified to appreciate the writings of Browne, has numbered him among his first favourites. Rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits; contemplative, imaginative, often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though, doubtless, too often big, stiff, and hyperLatinistic. He is a quiet and sublime enthusiast, Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, with a strong tinge of the fantast: the humorist and the mortal right-lined circlel must conclude and constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium philosophier, as the darting colours in shot silk play of time, which temporally considereth all things. Our upon the main dye.' The same writer has pointed fathers find their graves in our short memories, and out the entireness of Browne in every subject before sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. him. He never wanders from it, and he has no Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generaoccasion to wander; for whatever happens to be his tions pass while some trees stand, and old families subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. We last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions may add the complete originality of his mind. He like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigseems like no other writer, and his vast and solitary matical epithets, or first letters of our names, to be abstractions, stamped with his peculiar style, like studied by antiquaries who we were, and have new the hieroglyphic characters of the East, carry the names given us, like many of the mummies, are cold imagination back into the primeval ages of the consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by world, or forward into the depths of eternity. everlasting languages.

[Oblivion.]

To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan; disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself, who cares to subsist, like Hippocrates patients, tions, without deserts and noble acts, which are the or Achilles' horses in Homer, under naked nominabalsam of our memories, the entelechia and soul of our subsistences. To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives And who had not rather have been the good thief, more happily without a name than Herodias with one. than Pilate?

What song the syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarianism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names as they have done Poppy, and deals with the memory of men without for their relics, they had not so grossly erred in the distinction to merit of perpetuity: who can but pity art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. built it: time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's burnt the temple of Diana; he is almost lost that Vain ashes, which, in the oblivion of names, persons, horse; confounded that of himself. In vain we comtimes, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruit-pute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, less continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, since bad have equal durations; and Thersites is like as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against pride, to live as long as Agamemnon, without the favour of vain-glory, and maddening vices. Pagan vain-glories, the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never damped with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who, acting early, and before the probable meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already outlasted their monuments and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of time we cannot expect such mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias; and Charles V. can never hope to live

within two Methuselahs of Hector.2

And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names 1 That the world may last but six thousand years. Hector's fame lasting above two lives of Methuselah, before that famous prince was extant.

of men be known? or whether there be not more re

markable persons forgot than any that stand remem

bered in the known account of time? Without the

favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.

be content to be as though they had not been; to
Oblivion is not to be hired: the greatest part must
be found in the register of God, not in the record of
before the flood; and the recorded names ever since
man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story
contain not one living century. The number of
the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The
night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows
when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto that
current arithmetic which scarce stands one moment.

And since death must be the Lucina of life; and even
Pagans could doubt whether thus to live were to die;

1 The character of death.

s Gruteri Inscriptiones Antiquæ.

party is often as large as the main discourse upon nued his exertions in behalf of Protestantism, which, the subject.