truth.’  Shall this Association, I wonder, raise up from among its members, such a worthy successor and enlarger of Sir Thomas Browne?

The title, at least, of the Urn-Burial is more familiar to the most of us than that of the Pseudodoxia.  It was the chance discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk that furnished Sir Thomas with the occasion to write his Hydriotaphia.  And that classical book is only another illustration of his enormous reading, ready memory, and intense interest in everything that touches on the nature of man, and on his beliefs, habits, and hopes in all ages of his existence on this earth.  And the eloquence and splendour of this wonderful piece is as arresting to the student of style as its immense information is to the scholar and the antiquarian.  ‘The conclusion of the essay on Urn-Burial,’ says Carlyle, ‘is absolutely beautiful: a still elegiac mood, so soft, so deep, so solemn and tender, like the song of some departed

saint—an echo of deepest meaning from the great and mighty Nations of the Dead.  Sir Thomas Browne must have been a good man.’

The Garden of Cyrus is past all description of mine.  ‘The Garden of Cyrus must be read.  It is an extravagant sport of a scholar of the first rank and a genius of the first water.  ‘We write no herbal,’ he begins, and neither he does.  And after the most fantastical prose-poem surely that ever was written, he as fantastically winds up at midnight with this: ‘To keep our eyes longer open were but to act our antipodes.  The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.’  At which Coleridge must incontinently whip out his pencil till we have this note of his on the margin: ‘What life! what fancy! what whimsicality!  Was ever such a reason given for leaving one’s book and going to bed as this, that they are already past their first sleep in Persia, and that the huntsmen are up in America?’

Sir Thomas Browne has had many admirers, and his greatest admirers are to be found among our foremost men.  He has had Samuel Johnson among his greatest admirers, and Coleridge, and Carlyle, and Hazlitt, and Lytton, and Walter Pater, and Leslie Stephen, and Professor Saintsbury; than whom no one of

them all has written better on Browne.  And he has had princely editors and annotators in Simon Wilkin, and Dr. Greenhill, and Dr. Lloyd Roberts.  I must leave it to those eminent men to speak to you with all their authority about Sir Thomas Browne’s ten talents: his unique natural endowments, his universal scholarship, his philosophical depth, ‘his melancholy yet affable irony,’ his professional and scientific attainments, and his absolutely classical English style.  And I shall give myself up, in ending this discourse, to what is of much more importance to him and to us all, than all these things taken together,—for Sir Thomas Browne was a believing man, and a man of unfainting and unrelaxing prayer.  At the same time, and assuming, as he does, and that without usurpation, as he says, the style of a Christian, he is in reality a Theist rather than a Christian: he is a moral and a religious writer rather than an evangelical and an experimental writer.  And in saying this, I do not forget his confession of his faith.  ‘But to difference myself nearer,’ he says, and ‘to draw into a lesser circle, there is no Church whose every part so squares unto my conscience: whose Articles, Constitutions, and Customs seem so consonant unto reason,

and as it were framed to my particular Devotion, as this whereof I hold my Belief, the Church of England: to whose faith I am a sworn subject, and therefore in a double Obligation subscribe unto her Articles, and endeavour to observe her Constitutions.’  The author of the Religio Medici never writes a line out of joint, or out of tone or temper, with that subscription.  At the same time, his very best writings fall far short of the best writings of the Church of England.  Pater, in his fine paper, says that ‘Sir Thomas Browne is occupied with religion first and last in all he writes, scarcely less so than Hooker himself,’ and that is the simple truth.  Still, if the whole truth is to be told to those who will not make an unfair use of it, Richard Hooker’s religion is the whole Christian religion, in all its height and depth, and grace and truth, and doctrinal and evangelical fulness: all of which can never be said of Sir Thomas Browne.  I can well imagine Sir Thomas Browne recreating himself, and that with an immense delectation, over Hooker’s superb First Book.  How I wish that I could say as much about the central six chapters of Hooker’s masterly Fifth Book: as also about his evangelical and immortal Discourse of Justification!  A well-read

friend of mine suddenly said to me in a conversation we were holding the other day about Sir Thomas Browne’s religion, ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘Browne was nothing short of a Pelagian, and that largely accounts for his popularity on the Continent of his day.’  That was a stroke of true criticism.  And Sir Thomas’s own Tertullian has the same thing in that most comprehensive and conclusive phrase of his: anima naturaliter Christiana.  But, that being admitted and accepted, which must be admitted and accepted in the interests of the truth; this also must still more be proclaimed, admitted, and accepted, that when he comes to God, and to Holy Scripture, and to prayer, and to immortality, Sir Thomas Browne is a very prince of believers.  In all these great regions of things Sir Thomas Browne’s faith has a height and a depth, a strength and a sweep, that all combine together to place him in the very foremost rank of our most classical writers on natural and revealed religion.  Hooker himself in some respects gives place to Sir Thomas Browne.

‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind: and therefore, God never

wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His ordinary works convince it.  It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.’  The old proverb, Ubi tres medici, duo athei, cast an opprobrium on the medical profession that can never have been just.  At the same time, that proverb may be taken as proving how little true philosophy there must have been at one time among the medical men of Europe.  Whereas, in Sir Thomas Browne at any rate, his philosophy was of such a depth that to him, as he repeatedly tells us, atheism, or anything like atheism, had always been absolutely impossible.  ‘Mine is that mystical philosophy, from whence no true scholar becomes an atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, grows up a real divine, and beholds, not in a dream, as Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object, the types of his resurrection.’  Nor can he dedicate his Urn-Burial to his worthy and honoured friend without counselling him to ‘run up his thoughts upon the Ancient of Days, the antiquary’s truest object’; so continually does Browne’s imagination in all his books pierce into and terminate upon Divine Persons and upon unseen and

eternal things.  In his rare imagination, Sir Thomas Browne had the original root of a truly refining, ennobling, and sanctifying faith planted in his heart by the hand of Nature herself.  No man, indeed, in the nature of things, can be a believing Christian man without imagination.  A believing