THE FIRST copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s “Religio Medici” appeared in 1643, when it was printed from one of his manuscripts without his consent. He was thus forced to become famous, for when his corrected version of the essay appeared, it gave him at once the place he still holds among the most notable essayists of modern times. He followed it by his treatise on “Vulgar Errors,” “Urn Burial,” and “The Garden of Cyrus.” After his death in 1682, his “Christian Morals” and “Miscellanies” were published by his literary executors.

  The “Religio Medici” itself is its author’s best biography. “Now for my life,” he writes in it;—“it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable; for the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.” As we examine the intellect capable of this conception, we are more and more astonished at its unlikeness to what we are accustomed to assume as realities. Living in the England of the civil wars, in a world where Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Calvinist and Catholic were hacking and stabbing, torturing and burning and decapitating, he summed up his politics and his theology in the sentence: “Natura nihil agit frustra”:—

  Resting secure in this faith, he uttered no anathemas and split no skulls for conscience’ sake. To him as to Goethe in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, the disturbance produced by the evil passions of ambition, hate, and anger were unreal and transitory. The universe was still sane. The insane world in which others lived—Napoleon’s world dominated by the God who sides with the best artillery—had no power over him. If it be true that at the sack of Syracuse, Archimedes was killed because he rebuked the victors for interrupting his mathematics, his aloofness from the world of brutal struggle for survival illustrates a frame of mind closely related to that in which Doctor Browne quoted and translated Lucan:—

    It is hard for minds with modern habits fully to understand a thinker to whom Paracelsus was a scientific authority, witchcraft a reality, and the primum mobile a scientific definition, but the “Religio Medici” derives an additional charm from the imperfections which it owes to the superstition or the imperfect definitions of its times. It is never likely to go out of date. The passage of time which reveals its errors gives it a greater value as one of the most remarkable of those rare documents in which the human mind has recorded realities, both of strength and weakness, belonging not merely to the individual, but to humanity itself.

  The author of “Religio Medici” was born in London, October 19th, 1605. By profession he was a physician, educated at Oxford and Leyden in all the learning of his day. “Religio Medici” appeared in the year in which Charles I. left London to take the field against the Parliament, but Doctor Browne practiced medicine and wrote philosophy without interruption until the Restoration. Charles II. knighted him, and he lived to the age of seventy-seven, dying, October 19th, 1682, on the anniversary of his birth.