Born, in London, 19 Oct. 1605. Educated at Winchester Coll., as Scholar, 1616–23. To Broadgate Hall (now Pembroke Coll.), Oxford, 1623; B.A., 31 June 1626; M.A., 11 June 1629. Practised medicine for a short time. Tour in Ireland, France, Italy, Holland. Returned to practice near Halifax, “Religio Medici” probably written 1635. To Norwich, 1637. M.D., Oxford, 10 July 1637. Married Dorothy Mileham, 1641. “Religio Medici” privately published, 1642. Sided with Royalists in Civil Wars. Hon. Fellow of Coll. of Physicians, 6 July 1665. Knighted, on State visit of Charles II. to Norwich, 28 Sept. 1671. Died, 19 Oct. 1682; buried at Norwich. Works: “Religio Medici,” privately printed, 1642; authorized version, 1643; “Pseudodoxia Epidemica,” 1646; “Hydriotaphia,” 1658. Posthumous: “Certain Miscellany Tracts,” 1684; “Works,” 1686; “Posthumous Works,” 1712; “Christian Morals,” 1716. Collected Works: including Life and Correspondence, ed. by S. Wilkin (4 vols.), 1835–36.

Personal

  For a character of his person, his complexion and hair was answerable to his name, his stature was moderate, and habit of body neither fat nor lean but evoápkoc. In his habit of clothing, he had an aversion to all finery, and affected plainness, both in the fashion and ornaments. He ever wore a cloke, or boots, when few others did. He kept himself always very warm, and thought it most safe so to do, though he never loaded himself with such a multitude of garments, as Suetonius reports of Augustus, enough to clothe a good family…. His memory, though not so eminent as that of Seneca or Scaliger, was capacious and tenacious, insomuch as he remembered all that was remarkable in any book that he had read; and not only knew all persons again that he had ever seen at any distance of time, but remembered the circumstances of their bodies, and their particular discourses and speeches…. He was never seen to be transported with mirth, or dejected with sadness; always cheerful, but rarely merry, at any sensible rate, seldom heard to break a jest; and when he did, he would be apt to blush at the levity of it: his gravity was natural without affectation. His modesty was visible in a natural habitual blush, which was increased upon the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable cause. They that knew no more of him than by the briskness of his writings, found themselves deceived in their expectation when they came in his company, noting the gravity and sobriety of his aspect and conversation; so free from loquacity, or much talkativeness, that he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse; though when he was so, it was always singular and never trite or vulgar…. Sir Thomas understood most of the European languages, viz. all that are in Hutter’s bible, which he made use of. The Latin and Greek he understood critically.

  His own character was a fine mixture of humourist, genius, and pedant. A library was a living world to him, and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood! and the gravity with which he records contradictory opinions is exquisite.

  It is very remarkable, that although Sir Thomas Browne had forty children and grand-children (including those who were so by marriage), yet, in the second generation, within thirty years after his decease, the male line became extinct; and of the third generation, none survived their infancy, excepting in the family of his eldest daughter, Anne; of whose eight children, none left any descendants but the third daughter, Frances Fairfax, married to the Earl of Buchan; whose daughter, Lady Frances Erskine, married the celebrated Colonel Gardener, killed at Preston-pans in 1745;—whose grandson was the late Lord Erskine, one of the most splendid ornaments of the English bar, created Lord Chancellor in 1806; and from whom are thus lineally descended Henry David, the present and 12th Earl of Buchan, and David Montagu, the present and 2nd Lord Erskine of Restormel Castle.

  Of a mild and kindly temperament, fond of his books and his curiosities, and spinning out his subtle and aerial thoughts from materials which the crowded world casts out of its bustling way into nooks and corners—moderate as a politician, averse to all disputes in theology, inclined in both to leave things in their beaten course, beneath the shelter of unexamining veneration—there did not exist for Sir Thomas Browne those great and exciting interests which gird up the loins of a man’s mind, and make him in earnest in all that he undertakes.

  It is not difficult, from the fragmentary notices that have been left to us, to put together some picture of his personal appearance. He was a man of dignified appearance, with a striking resemblance, as Southey has remarked, to Charles I., “always cheerful, but never merry,” given to unseasonable blushing, little inclined to talk, but strikingly original when once launched in conversation; sedate in his dress, and obeying some queer medical crochets as to its proper arrangement; always at work in the intervals of his “drudging practice;” and generally a sober and dignified physician.

Religio Medici, 1642

  But to come back to our Physician; truly, my lord, I must needs pay him, as a due, the acknowledging his pious discourses to be excellent and pathetical ones, containing worthy motives to incite one to virtue, and to deter one from vice; thereby to gain heaven, and to avoid hell. Assuredly he is the owner of a solid head, and of a strong, generous heart.

  The book entitled “Religio Medici” is in high credit here. The author has wit; there are abundance of fine things in that book; he is a humorist, whose thoughts are very agreeable, but who, in my opinion, is to seek for a master in religion—as many others are—and, in the end, perhaps, may find none. One may say of him, as Philip de Comines did the founder of the Minimes, a hermit of Calabria, Francis de Paula, “he is still alive, and may grow worse as well as better.”

  The “Religio Medici” was no sooner published than it excited the attention of the publick by the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtlety of disquisition, and the strength of language.

  The “Religio Medici” is one of the most beautiful prose poems in the language; its power of diction, its subtlety and largeness of thought, exquisite conceits and images, have no parallel out of the writers of that brilliant age, when Poetry and Prose had not yet divided their domain, and the Lyceum of Philosophy was watered by the Ilissus of the Nine.

  This little book made a remarkable impression: it was soon translated into several languages, and is highly extolled by Conringius and others, who could only judge through these versions. Patin, though be rather slights it himself, tells us in one of his letters that it was very popular at Paris. The character which Johnson has given of the “Religio Medici” is well known; and, though perhaps rather too favorable, appears, in general, just. The mind of Browne was fertile, and, according to the current use of the word, ingenious; his analogies are original, and sometimes brilliant; and, as his learning is also in things out of the beaten path, this gives a peculiar and uncommon air to all his writings, and especially to the “Religio Medici.” He was, however, far removed from real philosophy, both by his turn of mind and by the nature of his erudition: he seldoms reasons; his thoughts are desultory; sometimes he appears sceptical or paradoxical; but credulity, and deference to authority, prevail.

  It is not their intrinsic merit that keeps the “Religio Medici” and the “Urn-Burial” alive; it is because they were written by Sir Thomas Browne. The perennial charm of his quaint and engaging personality is impressed upon every line. Hence their vitality.

  It is a book to be read slowly, with frequent pauses to allow the quaint thoughts to mature, and with full resolve to be led whither the writer’s fancy suggests. So read, it is a perpetual refreshment and delight. Though full of allusions, it is free from that overloading of quotation and reference which was a prevailing fault of the age, and which makes Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” so hard to enjoy.

  Sir Thomas Browne directed a free play of mind upon the old dogmas, and the result was the “Religio Medici,” a work which each generation treasures and rereads, not because of the dogma, but because of the literature; it is a rare specimen of vital, flexible, imaginative writing.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646

  It is, indeed, to be wished, that he had longer delayed the publication, and added what the remaining part of his life might have furnished: the thirty-six years which he spent afterwards in study and experience, would doubtless have made large additions to an Inquiry into Vulgar Errors.

  Browne was where the learned in Europe had been seventy years before, and seems to have been one of those who saturate their minds with bad books till they have little room for any thing new that is better. A man of so much credulity and such an irregular imagination as Browne was almost sure to believe in witchcraft and all sorts of spiritual agencies. In no respect did he go in advance of his age, unless we make an exception of his declaration against persecution. He seems to have been fond of those trifling questions which the bad taste of the schoolmen and their contemporaries introduced; as whether a man has fewer ribs than a woman, whether Adam and Eve had navels, whether Methusaleh was the oldest man; the problems of children put to adults. With a strong curiosity and a real love of truth, Browne is a striking instance of a merely empirical mind: he is at sea with sails and a rudder, but without a compass or log-book; and has so little notion of any laws of nature, or of any inductive reasoning either as to efficient or final causes, that he never seems to judge anything to be true or false except by experiment.

  No wonder, then, that Browne, who certainly was inferior to several of his contemporaries, should have been affected by a movement which they were unable to resist.

  To modern readers “Vulgar Errors” presents an inexhaustible store of entertainment. The attainment of scientific truth was not for Browne the sole object; it is in the discussion itself that he delights, and the more marvellous a fable is, the more sedulously he applies himself to the investigation of its truth. Though he professed his anxiety to dispel popular superstitions, Browne was himself not a little imbued with the spirit of credulity. He believed in astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and magic, and he never abandoned the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.

  Shows Browne’s insatiable love of what is strange, grotesque and mysterious. The book is, in truth, a museum of curiosities—the sweepings of an antiquarian’s note-book. Here you may read of the phœnix, the pelican, and the dolphin, of the flowering thorn and of the shrieking mandrake, of strange errors on Scripture or geography. On the whole, Browne seems more anxious to record than to refute; the benefit of the doubt generally falls on the side of credulity, for in a world so full of mystery how many things may be true that cannot be demonstrated.

Hydriotaphia, 1658

  There is, perhaps, none of his works which better exemplifies his reading or memory. It is scarcely to be imagined, how many particulars he has amassed together in a treatise which seems to have been occasionally written; and for which, therefore, no materials could have been previously collected.

  The slight vacuum in the left-hand case—two shelves from the ceiling—scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser—was whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties—but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself.

General

  The true classical style of Hooker and his fellows was easily open to corruption; and Sir Thomas Browne it was, who, though a writer of great genius, first effectually injured the literary taste of the nation by his introduction of learned words, merely because they were learned. It would be difficult to describe Browne adequately; exuberant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyper-latinistic, a quiet and sublime enthusiast; yet a fantast, a humourist, a brain with a twist; egotistic like Montaigne, yet with a feeling heart and an active curiosity, which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting after oddities. In his “Hydriotaphia” and, indeed, almost all his works, the entireness of his mental action is very observable; he metamorphoses every thing, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration. But Sir Thomas Browne with all his faults had a genuine idiom.

  Sir Thomas Browne seemed to be of opinion that the only business of life was to think, and that the proper object of speculation was, by darkening knowledge, to breed more speculation, and “find no end in wandering mazes lost.” He chose the incomprehensible and impracticable as almost the only subjects fit for a lofty and lasting contemplation, or for the exercise of a solid faith. He cried out for an oh altitudo beyond the heights of revelation, and posed himself with apocryphal mysteries, as the pastime of his leisure hours. He pushes a question to the utmost verge of conjecture, that he may repose on the certainty of doubt; and he removes an object to the greatest distance from him, that he may take a high and abstracted interest in it, consider it in its relation to the sum of things, not to himself, and bewilder his understanding in the universality of its nature and the inscrutableness of its origin. His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of pasteboard. He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his station in one of the planets. The antipodes are next-door neighbours to him, and Doomsday is not far off. With a thought he embraces both the poles; the march of his pen is over the great divisions of geography and chronology. Nothing touches him nearer than humanity. He feels that he is mortal only in the decay of nature, and the dust of long-forgotten tombs. The finite is lost in the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies or the history of empires are to him but a point in time or a speck in the universe. The great Platonic year revolves in one of his periods. Nature is too little for the grasp of his style. He scoops an antithesis out of fabulous antiquity, and rakes up an epithet from the sweepings of Chaos. It is as if his books had dropped from the clouds, or as if Friar Bacon’s head could speak. He stands on the edge of the world of sense and reason, and gains a vertigo by looking down at impossibilities and chimeras. Or he busies himself with the mysteries of the Cabala, or the enclosed secrets of the heavenly quincunxes, as children are amused with tales of the nursery. The passion of curiosity (the only passion of childhood) had in him survived to old age, and had superannuated his other faculties. He moralizes and grows pathetic on a mere idle fancy of his own, as if thought and being were the same, or as if “all this world were one glorious lie.”

  A writer of this school in the age of Charles I., and incomparably superior to any of the churchmen belonging to it, in the brightness and originality of his genius, sir Thomas Browne, whose varied talents wanted nothing but the controlling supremacy of good sense to place him in the highest rank of our literature, will furnish a better instance of the prevailing bias than merely theological writings. He united a most acute and skeptical understanding with strong devotional sensibility, the temperament so conspicuous in Pascal and Johnson, and which has a peculiar tendency to seek the repose of implicit faith.

  Sir Thomas Browne, like most other men of genius, is but an author of great imagination and original habits of thought and study, reflecting back upon us the fantastic light that he received from the influences that gathered and played around him…. A scholar by habit, a philosopher by boast, and a poet by nature.

  One of the most interesting specimens of the genuine philosopher in the annals of literature, is Sir Thomas Browne. His candour, scope, and kindliness, united with bravery of thought and originality of expression, make his works attractive beyond any other of the old English prose writers. The bulk of the writings of Sir Thomas Browne are curious rather than of practical value; but their indirect utility is greater than a casual view of their ostensible design would suggest. A vast amount of quaint knowledge, a vein of original speculation, and a loftiness of conception as well as waywardness of fancy, fix the mind to the page whither the quaint title attracts it.

  Sir Thomas Browne, deep, tranquil, and majestic as Milton, silently premeditating and “disclosing his golden couplets,” as under some genial instinct of incubation.

  The thoughtful melancholy, the singular mixture of skepticism and credulity, and the brilliancy of imaginative illustration, give his essays a peculiarity of character that renders them exceedingly fascinating.

  By no means free from blemishes, nor exempt from vain conceits and fancies, Sir Thomas Browne may yet be ranked as one of the foremost philosophical religious writers, of whom our language can boast.

  Out of such a writer the rightly attuned and sympathizing mind will draw many things more precious than any mere facts.

  His mixed devotion to science and credulity, his love of a comprehensive and liberal Christianity, his quaint enthusiasm and love of pleasantry, his vivacious and garrulous mysticism, which peopled the world around him with spiritual agencies, and saw in it everywhere the “picture of the Invisible,” closely ally him with such writers as More and Glanvill. Unconnected by any external bonds, he represents with them the same combination of inquiry and faith—the same yearning towards higher forms of truth, and the same love and fondness for the Past—the same eclecticism in thought—and must we not also say the same dreamy religious imaginativeness, more beautiful than strong, more picturesque and ideal than practically earnest, self-denying, and victorious?

  Browne had not the passionate fervour of Milton; grave, solemn, meditative, without fire or freshness of sentiment, he would have shrunk from Milton’s vituperative scorn, and could never have conceived the tender and graceful fancies of Milton’s smaller poems. The prevailing characteristic of his style is tranquil elaboration. He abounds in carefully-constructed periods, intermixed with short pointed sentences that have a singularly Johnsonian sound, from the fulness of the rhythm. His sentence-structure is more “formed” than in any previous writer, perhaps more so than in any writer anterior to Johnson. His figures are original, ingenious and peculiarly apt; he does not err in excess of similitudes. Felicitous and complete expression, comparatively free from tautology, inspires a general feeling of vigour; and here and there we are carried away by flights of high and solemn elevation. The great drawback for the modern reader is his excessive use of words coined from the Latin. Even Johnson condemns him on this score. His Latinised diction is all the more remarkable because he expressly condemns Latin quotations.

  Did any mirror, even of French plate glass, ever reflect any man’s outer configuration more vividly and distinctly than the strange inner nature of Sir Thomas Browne is mirrored in his periods? What a revelation we have of his inmost self,—what a picture of his wit, imagination, portentous memory, insatiable curiosity, “humorous sadness,” pedantry, and love of crutchets and hobbies, even “a whole stable-full,”—in the quaint analogies, the grotesque fancies, the airy paradoxes, the fine and dainty fretwork, the subtle and stately music, the amazing Latinisms, and the riotous paradoxes and eloquent epigrams of the old knight’s style!

  Paradox though it be, we may venture to say, that even in Sir Thomas Browne there is more of rich, strong, nervous English than in Steele or Tillotson.

  To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they did, upon death and decay. It is well, perhaps, that life should be something of a “meditation upon death;” but to many, certainly, Browne’s would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place—oftenest induces the feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind. Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophic apprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful genius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those ugly anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics, there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one day to reassert itself—stranger far than any fancied odylic gravelights!

  As an artist, or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vain to look anywhere for his superior…. The work of this country doctor is, for personal savour, for strangeness, and for delight, one of the most notable things in English literature…. In character and interest it yields to the work of no other English prose writer.

  If there were no other reason for our love of the best writings of Sir Thomas Browne, it would be for this—that in some scarce distinguishable way he has inoculated our “Elia” of a later day with something very like his own quaint egoisms and as quaint garniture of speech.

  He was one of those rare prose-writers whom we meet at intervals in the history of literature, who leave nothing to improvisation, but balance and burnish their sentences until they reach a perfection analogous to that of very fine verse. Supported by his exquisite ear, Browne permits himself audacities, neologism, abrupt transitions, which positively take away our breath. But while we watch him thus dancing on the tight-rope of style, we never see him fall; if he lets go his footing in one place, it is but to amaze us by his agility in leaping to another. His scheme has been supposed to be founded on that of Burton, and certainly Browne is no less captivated by the humours of melancholy. But if Burton is the greater favourite among students, Browne is the better artist and the more imaginative writer.

  The phrasing of Sir Thomas Browne, Milton’s contemporary, is characterized by literary ingenuity and a certain quaint affectation that has an original flavor and a charm of its own, though his great attraction lies in the rhythm of his sentences and the fine quality of his thought. He, too, is disfigured by writing in an artificial language which, however, like the stiff ruff and long waist of the period, could not altogether hide natural grace and symmetry.