very sound advice, and was surpassing dexterous in arbitrements upon any reference submitted to him, but that he thought it did derogate from the nobility of his house and reputation of his person, to look to petty things in matter of his own affairs. Whereupon, after forty years' custom, being habituated thereunto, he found himself at last, to his great regret, insensibly plunged into inextricable difficulties; in the large field whereof, the insatiable creditor, to make his harvest by the ruin of that family, struck in with his sickle, and by masking himself with a vizard composed of the rags of the Scottish law, in its severest sense, claims the same right to the whole inheritance that Robin Hood did to Frankindal's money, for being master of the purse wherein it' was. Those wretched and unequitable courses, indefatigably prosecuted by merciless men to the utter undoing of the author and exterminion of his name, have induced him, out of his respect to antiquity, his piety to succession, and that intim regard of himself which by divine injunction ought to be the rule and measure of his love towards his neighbour, to set down in this parcel of his Introduction, the cruel usage wherewith he hath been served these many years past by that inexorable race, the lamentable preparatives which, by granting their desires, would ensue to the extirpation of worthy pedigrees, and the unexemplifiable injustice thereby redounding to him who never was in any thing obliged to them. The premisses he enlargeth with divers quaint and pertinent similes, and after a neat apparelling of usury in its holiday garments, he deduceth, from the laws and customs of all nations, the tender care that ought to be had in the preservation of ancient families; the particulars whereof, in matter of ordonance he evidenceth by the acts of Solon, the decrees of the decemvirs, and statutes of the Twelve Tables; and for its executional part, in the persons of Q. Fabius, Tiberius the Emperor, and the Israelitish observers of the sacred institution of Jubilees. By which enarration nothing is more clearly inferred, than that, seeing both Jews and Gentiles, Painims and Christians, in their both monarchical and polyarchical governments, have been so zealous in their obsequiousness to so pious a mandate, that the present age being no less concerned in the happy fruits thereof than the good days of old, the splendid authority of this Isle should be pleased not to eclipse their commendation by innovating any thing in the author's case. Who, deciphering the implacability of flagitators, by showing how they throw in

obstacles retarding their own payment, thereby tacitly to hasten his destruction, and hinting at the unnatural breach of some of his fiduciaries, he particularizeth the candour of his own endeavours, and nixuriencie to give all men contentment; the discourse whereof, in all its periods, very well deserveth the serious animadversion of the ingenious reader.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

[Thomas Browne, who was knighted by Charles the Second in the year 1671, was born at London in or near Cheapside, on the 19th October 1605, his father being a mercer, but of a good Cheshire family; his mother, Ann Garraway of Sussex. The father died early, and the mother married again, her second husband, Sir Thomas Dutton, being probably identical with a soldier of a quick temper who killed his colonel, Sir Hatton Cheeke, in a duel. He seems, however, to have been a friendly stepfather, and can have had nothing to do with the inroad said to have been made on the child's fortune by a dishonest guardian. Nor are there any signs of straitened means in any part of Browne's career. He became a scholar of Winchester in 1616, and matriculated at Broadgate Hall, Oxford (which during his residence became Pembroke College) seven years later. The date of his B.A. degree was 1626, of his M.A. 1629, and about four years later he took the further degree of Doctor of Medicine at Leyden. He is said to have practised earlier in Oxfordshire, to have spent some time in Ireland, and then to have travelled a good deal on the Continent. After returning, and perhaps after some professional stay both in London and in Yorkshire, he settled in 1636 at Norwich, which was his home for the remainder of his life. In 1641 he married a Norfolk lady, Dorothy Mileham, who brought him into relations with some of the best families of the county. He was incorporated as M. D. of his own University in 1637; became Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1665; was knighted, as above mentioned, and died of a colic on his birthday in the year 1682. His domestic relations, of which we have some memorials in letters, etc., appear to have been uniformly happy, and his entire life was spent quietly in the practice of his profession, and the study of the sciences appertaining to it. His first literary appearance was made with the Religio Medici, written, as it would appear, about his thirtieth year, but not published till seven years later (1642), and then, by his own account, surreptitiously. A controversy, for which there is no room here, followed. The Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors, his longest and most popular work appeared in 1646; and he published the Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus in 1658. Nothing more was printed in his lifetime, but additions were subsequently made, the most important of which was the Christian Morals, not published till 1716. The standard edition of Browne, a most excellent one, is that of Simon Wilkin, first published in four volumes in 1835, and since included in three volumes of Bohn's Library. Two editions of separate works are sufficiently important to be mentioned, that of Christian Morals (1756), with a Life certainly and notes probably (certainly to me) by Dr. Johnson, and that of the same book with the Religio Medici, and a Letter to a Friend, by Dr. Greenhill, 1881, notable for the extraordinary minuteness of the pains taken with the text and vocabulary.]

GUY PATIN when, very shortly after the appearance of Religio Medici, a Latin translation by John Merryweather had brought the book to the notice of continental men of letters, described Browne as "un mélancholique agréable en ses pensées." There may have been a little in this of the traditional estimate of English sadness. But Patin was a man of very shrewd and unprejudiced mind, and there was not as yet in his time the severance between insular and continental thought and letters which the disuse of Latin and the overbearing rise of French power and credit, political and literary, were soon to bring about. And the judgment, though inadequate, is neither inaccurate nor superficial. In temperament, as well as in those perhaps inseparable accidents of temperament, which are called manner and style, Browne strongly resembles, though with 'remarkable differences, his earlier contemporary, Burton. There was indeed nothing "horrid" about Browne's melancholy, as there is traditionally asserted to have been about Burton's, and the abundant sights which we have of him-writing to his children, mixing in the society of Norwich, noting its antiquities, and the natural history of its neighbourhood —are almost as cheerful as they can be. But it must be remembered that about Burton's private character and ways we really know nothing at all. (Comparing the works of the two men we find in Browne a somewhat slighter tendency to regard all things in relation to spiritual valetudinarianism, a more poetical temper, a more rhetorical style, more mysticism, and a more decided piety. But there is in him also the principal mark of the Burtonian melancholy, the ceaseless contemplation of things from the point of view of an unsatisfied and unflinching curiosity, which seems to regard the attempt to satisfy itself as the only panacea, or at least palliative, for the evils of life. Both are humorous, from which it will follow as the night the day that both are melancholy. And though Browne does not necessarily see, and probably was not at all disposed to see all things in melancholy as does his neighbour on the other side of St. Aldate's, there is at least an equally strong undercurrent of this quality in him.) Not merely in the famous and almost hackneyed, but here of necessity once more quoted peroration of the Urn Burial, where the subject may be said to have demanded it, but always when he is in his most impressive key, the note of sadness, not passionate or querulous, but contemplative and questioning, is heard.

That Browne must have been an exceedingly careful writer is

not only obvious from the most cursory perusal of his work, but may be said to be established beyond a doubt by documentary evidence. In the first place there is the very significant fact that almost all his ornate and most striking passages are to be found in the works which he himself prepared for the press and sent through it; while the posthumous works, though considerable in bulk, much more rarely exhibit them. In the second place, by a piece of good luck too rare with English authors of the first class, we possess large stores of Browne's MSS. which were bought by Sir Hans Sloane, and thus passed to the British Museum. And these contain numerous variants, first drafts, supplements, and the like, to and of the more elaborate passages. The fact, however, could not be doubted if we had no such evidence. (It is perfectly clear that Browne was, in the older and good sense, one of the most artificial writers of English that ever existed.) Very few English authors-Shakespeare and Pope are the chief exceptions -have had the benefit of special lexicons such as those which, under the care of M. Adolphe Regnier and his coadjutors and successors, have been gradually compiled for almost all the greater authors of France. But if no one has yet attempted this for the whole of Browne, Dr. Greenhill has done it for three capital opuscula which he edited, as a part and a main part of an "index" which fills seventy pages to barely thrice that number of text. There is thus brought together, in an easy conspectus, what all careful readers of Browne must have always had before them dispersedly his unmatched audacity and fecundity of vocabulary. Disengaged from its accompanying matter, and enriched with a similar glossary to the Pseudodoxia and the other works, it would probably constitute the most remarkable repertory of the kind in English.

It is generally and sufficiently known that most of this vocabulary is borrowed from the classical languages, and especially from Latin It has indeed become a commonplace that Johnson's comparatively early work on Browne determined his own indulgence in this direction; though Johnson never Latinised with half the temerity of his master. But it would be at once an insufficiency and an injustice to put Browne down as a mere "Limousin student," a mere clumsy corruptor of his native tongue with Latinisms and Græcisms. He was the less likely to be this, inasmuch as he was a diligent reader, and a keen relisher of Rabelais himself, and has left among his letters a Pantagruelist epistle