ceasing his bootless toil as a patriot, resume his laurelled rest as a poet. And Milton's life during these twenty years is but a type of the intellectual life of England as a whole, during the same vehement period. All was division, all was rage, all was partisanship, all was controversy. Yet precisely at this time was it that Sir Thomas Browne was penning in his study at Norwich most of those quaint treatises about all things and sundry, which, now that we read them, seem to belong, by their spirit at least, to no century in particular, much less to a period of English civil war and revolution. In strict historical accuracy there can be no doubt that Sir Thomas Browne was a royalist; but a more unflurried royalist-a man who, whether the King won or the Parliament won, whether the Republic were continued or the Monarchy restored, could in either case more quietly pursue the even tenor of his way-there did not exist in England. On this account alone he would deserve to be remembered, even were his works less wise and curious than all who know them admit them to be.

Browne was a Londoner by birth, having been born in the parish of St. Michael's, Cheapside, in the year 1605. His father was a wealthy mercer, who died while his son was still young, leaving a very considerable fortune to be divided between his widow and four children. The widow married again a Sir Thomas Dutton, and the property of her children fell under the administration of guardians, who squandered or appropriated a great part of it. After being educated for some time at Winchester School, Browne was sent, in 1623, to Broadgate Hall, afterwards Pembroke College, Oxford. Here he graduated B.A. in 1626-7, and M.A. in 1629. Having chosen the medical profession, and completed his studies for that profession at Oxford, he practised for some time in the neighbourhood of the University. Then, quitting Oxford, he visited Ireland in company with his stepfather, who was sent at the time to that country on an official employment under Government. Once on the move, he travelled into France and Italy, spending some time at the famous medical schools of Montpellier and Padua; and, returning to England through Holland, he made some stay at Leyden, from the University of which place he received the degree of Doctor in Medicine. This was in 1633, and in 1637 he was incorporated Doctor of Medicine at Oxford. On his return to England he had recommenced practice as a physician in a country district near Halifax, in Yorkshire; but in 1636 or 1637, he removed thence to Norwich, in the vicinity of which city he had several influential friends and acquaintances. At the time of his settlement in Norwich, he was in his thirty-second year, and he remained there

in extensive practice as a physician all the rest of his life. That life was one of quiet local usefulness, marked by few incidents save those of an ordinary domestic kind, and the publication, in succession, of his various books. In 1641 he married a Norfolkshire lady of good family, by whom, in the course of the next twenty or five-and-twenty years he had eleven sons and daughters. In 1642 (just at the time when the King and the Parliament were raising their standards against each other, and calling the country to arms), a treatise which Browne had composed some seven years before, while he was living as a physician in Yorkshire, and which, since that time, had been shown about in manuscript among his friends, and copied by some of them, was surreptitiously published under the title of Religio Medici; or, the Religion of a Physician. As the work, thus published without the author's consent, began immediately to attract notice, he issued a more perfect edition of it in his own name, in the following year. The copies were sold fast; the work was speedily translated into Latin and into various foreign languages; answers to it were published; and the physician of Norwich found himself suddenly famous. Thus encouraged to continued authorship, he seems to have employed himself diligently thereafter, during such leisure as his patients allowed him, in noting down, in common-place books or otherwise, matter for future publications. The matter was of various kinds. Always, apparently, a miscellaneous and insatiable reader, and surrounded in his house at Norwich with a choice library of books in the ancient and in most modern tongues, he seems to have continued the habit of reading for its own sake, and of jotting down the results of his reading, as a part of his daily recreation. He had also a garden, and, in his walks about Norwich and its neighbourhood, he had his eyes cheerfully open for such facts and observations as were to be obtained rather from life and nature than from books. But, in his case as in others, both his readings and his observations came naturally to be directed by and to serve certain leading tendencies of his mind. On the whole, he was a molluscous man of a composite order, combining the tastes of the naturalist with those of the archæologist, and also with those of the meditative philosopher. His medical education had helped to make him a naturalist, and the same constitutional love of the curious, on which education had acted to make him that, took the form also of a liking for history and antiquities. Accordingly, though he had presented himself in his first work rather as a meditative philosopher, in his next work he appeared rather in the double character of the naturalist and the archeologist. This work, which was published in 1646 (in which year the first Civil War was just

coming to a close, and the King's fortunes were at the worst), was the well-known Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Inquiries into very many received Tenets and commonly presumed Truths, which, examined, prove but vulgar and common Errors. If an author reveals himself in his choice of subjects, the conclusion, on the announcement of such a book as this, must have been that Browne was a singular sort of man. The book itself was very popular; and, in the interval between the two civil wars, many found time to read it and comment on it. While the King's trial was proceeding, the author was preparing a second edition, which was published in 1650. Then, all through Cromwell's last military triumphs in Ireland, Scotland, and England, and his subsequent Protectorate, Browne seems to have gone on, unruffled as before, visiting his patients, pottering about the streets and lanes in and near Norwich, experimenting in his garden, and reading and making notes in his study. In 1658, a few months before Cromwell's death, out he came with another book, most peculiarly relevant, it will be seen, to the perplexed and anxious state of the country at that time. The book consisted of two distinct treatises bound together-the one entitled, Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk; the other, The Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, and mystically considered. These two treatises were the last works of any consequence published during the author's lifetime; for it is one of the singularities of his history that, though not more than fifty-five years of age at the Restoration, and though he lived two-and-twenty years after it, he ceased from that time to come before the world as an author. As he had published in stormy times, when most others did not publish, or published only what bore on passing events, so, when the times became such that general literature was again in fashion, and books of all sorts were in demand, he relapsed into comparative silence, and the quiet practice of his profession. Not, however, that he was idle even with his pen. His reputation among his educated countrymen increasing as his former works circulated, new editions of them were called for, some of which-and particularly one edition of his Vulgar Errors-he enriched with new matter, or otherwise amended; and, besides, he kept slowly adding to his stores of manuscript various continuous pieces, and a considerable mass of scraps and notes, the publication of which, at intervals since his death, has nearly doubled the bulk of his writings as previously known. Among these papers, written after the Restoration, and left in a fit state for posthumous publication, were his so-called Miscellany (i.e.,

Ereats of his Life.

149

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coming to a close, and the King's fortunes were at the worst), was the well-known Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Inquiries into very many received Tenets and commonly presumed Truths, which, examined, prove but vulgar and common Errors. If an author reveals himself in his choice of subjects, the conclusion, on the announcement of such a book as this, must have been that Browne was a singular sort of man. The book itself was very popular; and, in the interval between the two civil wars, many found time to read it and comment on it. While the King's trial was proceeding, the author was preparing a second edition, which was published in 1650. Then, all through Cromwell's last military triumphs in Ireland, Scotland, and England, and his subsequent Protectorate, Browne seems to have gone on, unruffled as before, visiting his patients, pottering about the streets and lanes in and near Norwich, experimenting in his garden, and reading and making notes in his study. In 1658, a few months before Cromwell's death, out he came with another book, most peculiarly relevant, it will be seen, to the perplexed and anxious state of the country at that time. The book consisted of two distinct treatises bound together-the one entitled, Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk; the other, The Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, and mystically considered. These two treatises were the last works of any consequence published during the author's lifetime; for it is one of the singularities of his history that, though not more than fifty-five years of age at the Restoration, and though he lived two-and-twenty years after it, he ceased from that time to come before the world as an author. As he had published in stormy times, when most others did not publish, or published only what bore on passing events, so, when the times became such that general literature was again in fashion, and books of all sorts were in demand, he relapsed into comparative silence, and the quiet practice of his profession. Not, however, that he was idle even with his pen. His reputation among his educated countrymen increasing as his former works circulated, new editions of them were called for, some of which-and particularly one edition of his Vulgar Errors-he enriched with new matter, or otherwise amended; and, besides, he kept slowly adding to his stores of manuscript various continuous pieces, and a considerable mass of scraps and notes, the publication of which, at intervals since his death, has nearly doubled the bulk of his writings as previously known. Among these papers, written after the Restoration, and left in a fit state for posthumous publication, were his so-called Miscellany (i.e.,