Fall not into
transforming
degenera-
tions, which under the old name create a new nation.
tions, which under the old name create a new nation.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
”
How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases
which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and
sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and
lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as
verse.
«Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the
grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omit-
ting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;) ( When
personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when
reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:” — such
passages as these, and the whole of the Fragment on Mummies,' one
can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which
the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.
That the Religio Medici? was the work of a gentleman before
his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active
in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties
of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, I have shaken hands
with delight [sc. by way of parting] in my warm blood and canic-
ular days. ” So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so.
austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of
those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind.
Its
frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been
compared with Montaigne's: if Montaigne had been graduated after a
due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely
crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the fluctus
decumanus gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would
have been closer.
«The Religio Medici,” says Coleridge, is a fine portrait of a
handsome man in his best clothes. " There is truth in the criticism,
and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who
does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden,
that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of
the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and
a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?
This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart in the still air
of delightful studies,” is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He
thinks his thoughts in his own way, and the style is the man”
never more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions
the execution of Charles I. as a “horrid murther, and another speaks
## p. 2480 (#40) ############################################
2480
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
as
of Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the
public eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultu-
ous and heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that
Shakespeare was of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton
and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the par-
allels in their thought and feeling and in his, were his contempo-
raries. Constant and extensive as are his excursions into ancient
literature, it is rare for him to make any reference to writers of his
own time.
Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great
names of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries.
His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute
observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of
our modern school:-“What is the use of dew-claws in dogs? ” He
does not instantly answer, a schoolboy in this Darwinian day
would, “To carry out an analogy; but the mere asking of the ques-
tion sets him ahead of his age. See too his curious inquiries into the
left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and
squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician
Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value: “his piece De
Circul. Sang. ,' which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus. ” And
here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved
a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur - concerning
canine madness, whether it holdeth not better at second than at
first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the
evil proves less considerable. ” He is the first to observe and describe
that curious product of the decomposition of flesh known to modern
chemists as adipocere.
He is full of eager anticipation of the future. "Join sense unto
reason,” he cries, and experiment unto speculation, and so give life
unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.
What
libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new
world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few
ages may joyfully declare. ”
But acute and active as our author's perceptions were, they did
not prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to
the devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part
in the economy of the world. This belief affords so easy a solution
of some problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may
look back with envy upon those who held it in serene and comfort-
able possession.
It is to be regretted, however, that the eminent Lord Chief Justice
Hale in 1664, presiding at the trial for witchcraft of two women,
should have called Dr. Browne, apparently as amicus curia, to give
## p. 2481 (#41) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2481
his view of the fits which were supposed to be the work of the
witches. He was clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more
to do with that case than he has with most cases of hysteria; and
consequently the witches, it must be said, fared no better in Sir
Matthew Hale's court than many of their kind in various parts of
Christendom about the same time. But it would be unreasonable for
us to hold the ghost of Sir Thomas deeply culpable because, while
he showed in most matters an exceptionally enlightened liberality of
opinion and practice, in this one particular he declined to deny the
scientific dictum of previous ages and the popular belief of his own
time.
The mental attitude of reverent belief in its symbolic value, in
which this devout philosopher contemplated the material world, is
that of inany of those who have since helped most to build the
structure of Natural Science. The rapturous exclamation of Linnæus,
“My God, I think thy thoughts after thee! ) comes like an antiph-
onal response by “the man of flowers to these passages in the
(Religio Medici? : « This visible world is but a picture of the invisi-
ble, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal
shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible
fabric. ” “Things are really true as they correspond unto God's con-
ception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity unto
that intellect, in whose idea they had their first determinations. )
his. Bacon
FROM THE RELIGIO MEDICI
I
Could never divide myself from any man upon the difference
of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agree-
ing with me in that from which within a few days I should
dissent myself. I have no genius to disputes in religion, and
have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a
disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the
weakness of my patronage. Where we desire to be informed, 'tis
good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and
establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below
our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons
may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our
own. Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to
take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity: many from the
V-156
## p. 2482 (#42) ############################################
2482
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
as
ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal for truth,
have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain
trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just
possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender;
'tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazard
her on a battle: if therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I
do forget them, or at least defer them, till my better settled
judgment and more manly reason be able to resolve them; for I
perceive every man's own reason is his best Edipus, and will,
upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds where-
with the subtleties of error have enchained our more flexible and
tender judgments. In philosophy, where truth seems double-
faced, there is no more paradoxical than myself: but in
divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit,
yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by
which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the
epicycle of my own brain: by these means I leave no gap for
heresy, schisms, or errors.
man
As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties
in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they
never stretched the pia mater of mine: methinks there be not
impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deep-
est mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but
maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose
myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those
involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation
and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and
my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Ter-
tullian, “Certum est quia impossibile est. ” I desire to exercise
my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and vis-
ible objects is not faith, but persuasion. Some believe the better
for seeing Christ's sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red
Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself
and am thankful that I live not in the days of miracles, that I
never saw Christ nor his disciples; I would not have been one
of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ's
patients on whom he wrought his wonders: then had my faith
been thrust upon me; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing
pronounced to all that believe and saw not. 'Tis an easy and
## p. 2483 (#43) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2483
necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath exam-
ined: I believe he was dead and buried, and rose again; and
desire to see him in his glory, rather than to contemplate him
in his cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe; as
we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they only had
the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his
coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could
raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.
In my solitary and retired imagination,
“Neque enim cum lectulus aut me
Porticus excepit, desum mihi”.
a
I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contem-
plate Him and his attributes who is ever with me, especially
those two mighty ones, His wisdom and eternity: with the one I
recreate, with the other I confound my understanding; for who
can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think thereof with-
out an ecstasy ? Time we may comprehend: it is but five days
older than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world;
but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give
such an infinite start forward as to conceive an end in an
essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it
puts my reason to St. Paul's sanctuary: my philosophy dares
not say the angels can do it; God hath not made a creature that
can comprehend him; it is a privilege of his own nature: I am .
that I am, was his own definition unto Moses; and it was
short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God or
ask him what he was. Indeed he only is; all others have and
shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and
therefore that terrible term predestination, which hath troubled
so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in
respect to God no prescious determination of our states to come,
but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the
instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indi-
visible and all together, the last trump is already sounded, the
reprobates in the flame and the blessed in Abraham's bosom.
St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, a thousand years to
God are but as one day; for to speak like a philosopher, those
continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years
make not to him one moment: what to us is to come, to his
## p. 2484 (#44) ############################################
2484
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent
point, without succession, parts, flux, or division.
we owe
The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied
and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason
unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without
this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was
before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that
could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God
receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare
about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works: those highly
magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and delib-
erate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and
learned admiration.
«Natura nihil agit frustra,” is the only indisputable axiom
in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature; not anything
framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces: in the
most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in
the ark, but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of
nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is— in these
is the wisdom of His hand discovered; out of this rank Solomon
chose the object of his admiration; indeed, what reason may not
go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders ? what wise
hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder
heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature — whales,
elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the
colossi and majestic pieces of her hand: but in these narrow
engines there is more curious mathematics; and the civility of
these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their
Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his fly beyond his
eagle, or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those
little bodies, than but one in the trunk of a cedar? I could
never content my contemplation with those general pieces of
wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile,
the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to
match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected
pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the
cosmography of myself: we carry with us the wonders we seek
without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are
that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies
## p. 2485 (#45) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2485
wisely learns in a compendium, what others labor at in a divided
piece and endless volume.
Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity:
besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature,
that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the
eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one have discovered
him in the other. This was the Scripture and Theology of the
heathens: the natural motion of the sun made them more admire
him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel; the
ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them than
in the other all his miracles: surely the heathens knew better
how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians,
who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics and
disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature. Nor do I so
forget God as to adore the name of nature; which I define not,
with the schools, to be the principle of motion and rest, but that
straight and regular line, that settled and constant course the
wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures, accord-
ing to their several kinds. To make a revolution every day is
the nature of the sun, because of that necessary course which
God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve but by a
faculty from that voice which first did give it motion. Now this
course of nature God seldom alters or perverts, but, like an excel-
lent artist, hath so contrived his work that with the selfsame
instrument, without a new creation, he may effect his obscurest
designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a wood, preserveth
the creatures in the ark, which the blast of his mouth might
have as easily created; for God is like a skillful geometrician, who
when more easily, and with one stroke of his compass, he might
describe or divide a right line, had yet rather to do this in a
circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid
principles of his art: yet this rule of his he doth sometimes per-
vert to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arro-
gancy of our reason should question his power and conclude he
could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of
God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to
ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honor of the prin-
cipal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may
do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our
houses, and our pens receive the honor of our writing. I hold
there is a general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no
## p. 2486 (#46) ############################################
2486
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
deformity in any kind of species whatsoever: I cannot tell by
what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being
created in those outward shapes and figures which best express
those actions of their inward forms. And having passed that
general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was
good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity,
and is the rule of order and beauty: there is no deformity but
in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty,
nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts that they
become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To
speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or
misshapen but the chaos; wherein, notwithstanding, to speak
strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet
impregnate by the voice of God; now nature is not at variance
with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his
providence: art is the perfection of nature: were the world now
as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos; nature hath
made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are arti-
ficial; for nature is the art of God.
I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of
Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the
library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too
many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and
ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the
perished leaves of Solomon. I would not omit a copy of Enoch's
Pillars had they many nearer authors than Josephus, or did not
relish somewhat of the fable. Some men have written more than
others have spoken: Pineda quotes more authors in one work
than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great in-
ventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their
incommodities. It is not a melancholy utinam of my own, but
the desires of better heads, that there were a general synod; not
to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the bene-
fit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid
authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions
of rhapsodies begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker
judgments of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of
typographers.
Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and
spells are not witches, or, as we term them, magicians. I con-
## p. 2487 (#47) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2487
ceive there is a traditional magic not learned immediately from
the Devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having
once the secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practice
without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of
nature; where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will
under any master produce their effects. Thus, I think at first a
great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward
derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed
no more but the honest effects of nature: what invented by us
is philosophy, learned from him is magic. We do surely owe
the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad
angels. I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without
an asterisk or annotation: «Ascendens astrum multa revelat
quærentibus magnalia naturæ, i. e. , opera Dei. ” I do think that
many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the
courteous revelations of spirits, — for those noble essences in
heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth;
and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous
prognostics which forerun the ruins of States, princes, and pri-
vate persons are the charitable premonitions of good angels,
which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and
nature.
Now, besides these particular and divided spirits there may be
(for aught I know) an universal and common spirit to the whole
world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Her-
metical philosophers: if there be a common nature that unites ,
and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species,
why may there not be one that unites them all? However, I
am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet
makes no part of us: and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and
scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is the life
and radical heat of spirits and those essences that know not the
virtue of the sun; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell: this is
that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days
hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists
of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves
the region of the mind in serenity: whosoever feels not the
warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel
his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me
there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt
in the body of the sun.
## p. 2488 (#48) ############################################
2488
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
11
1
!
I believe that the whole frame of a beast doth perish, and is
left in the same state after death as before it was materialled
unto life: that the souls of men know neither contrary nor cor-
ruption; that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by
the privilege of their proper natures, and without a miracle; that
the souls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take possession of
heaven: that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are
not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils,
prompting and suggesting us into mischief, blood, and villainy;
instilling and stealing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are
not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs
of the world: but that those phantasms appear often, and do
frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because
those are the dormitories of the dead, where the Devil, like an
insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of
his victory in Adam.
This is that dismal conquest we all deplore, that makes us so
often cry, “Adam, quid fecisti ? " I thank God I have not those
strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on
life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death: not that
I am insensible of the dread and horror thereof; or by raking
into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomies,
skeletons, or cadaverous reliques, like vespilloes or grave-makers,
I am become stupid or have forgot the apprehension of mor-
tality; but that marshaling all the horrors, and contemplating the
extremities thereof, I find not anything therein able to daunt the
courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian; and there-
fore am not angry at the error of our first parents, or unwilling
to bear a part of this common fate, and like the best of them to
die - that is, to cease to breathe, to take a farewell of the ele- •
ments, to be a kind of nothing for a moment, to be within one.
instant of a spirit. When I take a full view and circle of myself
without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice,
Death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant: were
there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this
world should not entreat a moment's breath from me; could the
Devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I would not
"outlive that very thought. I have so abject a conceit of this
common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements,
I cannot think this to be a man, or to live according to the dig-
nity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience
1
## p. 2489 (#49) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2489
embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often defy
death: I honor any man that contemns it, nor can I highly love
any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a soldier,
and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will
die at the command of a sergeant. For a pagan there may be
some motives to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be
amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma
that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.
I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel
been able to effront or enharden me; yet I have one part of
modesty which I have seldom discovered in another, that is (to
speak truly) I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed
thereof: 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures that
in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, wife,
and children, stand afraid and start at us. The birds and beasts
of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting
all allegiance, begin to prey upon us. This very conceit hath in
a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed up in
the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied,
without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and
none had said, “Quantum mutatus ab illo! ” Not that I
ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for
playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life
for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might
not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any.
am
Men commonly set forth the torments of hell by fire and
the extremity of corporal afflictions, and describe hell in the same
method that Mahomet doth heaven. This indeed makes a noise,
and drums in popular ears: but if this be the terrible piece
thereof, it is not worthy to stand in diameter with heaven, whose
happiness consists in that part that is best able to comprehend
it -- that immortal essence, that translated divinity and colony of
God, the soul. Surely, though we place hell under earth, the
Devil's walk and purlieu is about it; men speak too popularly
who place it in those flaming mountains which to grosser appre-
hensions represent hell. The heart of man is the place the Devil'
dwells in: I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps
his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me. There are as .
many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds: there was more
## p. 2490 (#50) ############################################
2490
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
than one hell in Magdalen, when there were seven devils, for
every devil is an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture
in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to
afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or
introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but pity the merciful
intention of those hands that do destroy themselves ? the Devil,
were it in his power, would do the like; which being impossible,
his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute
wherein he is impassible, his immortality.
I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of
hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place; I have
so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot
the idea of hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one
than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a
perfect hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to complete our
afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin,
nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear God,
yet am not afraid of him; his mercies make me ashamed of my
sins, before his judgments afraid thereof; these are the forced •'
and secondary method of his wisdom, which he useth but as the
last remedy, and upon provocation: a course rather to deter the ·
wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship. I can hardly
think there was ever any scared into heaven; they go the fairest
way to heaven that would serve God without a hell; other mer-
cenaries, that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term
themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Al-
mighty.
That which is the cause of my election I hold to be the cause
of my salvation, which was the mercy and beneplacit of God,
before I was, or the foundation of the world. “Before Abraham
was, I am,” is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense,
if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but
Adam — that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod
held from all eternity: and in this sense, I say, the world was
before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning;
and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be
England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of
me before she conceived of Cain.
Now for that other virtue of charity, without which faith is a'
mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavored to ·
## p. 2491 (#51) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2491
nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I bor-
rowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and pre-
scribed laws of charity: and if I hold the true anatomy of
myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of
virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts
and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather
idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at
the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor
at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst
them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree
with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gath-
. ered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at
the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander: at the
sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a
stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common
antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repug-
nances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch: but where I find their
actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honor, love, and
embrace them in the same degree. I was born in the eighth
climate, but seem for to be framed and constellated unto all: I
am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden; all places, all
airs, make unto me one country; I am in England, everywhere,
and under any meridian; I have been shipwrecked, yet am not
enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play or sleep in a
tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience
would give me the lie if I should absolutely detest or hate any
essence but the Devil; or so at least abhor anything but that we
might come to composition. If there be any among those com-
mon objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that
great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion — the multitude: that
numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men.
and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together,
make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious .
than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools; it is
the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solo-
mon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe
Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the
base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even amongst
*the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with
• the same wheel as these; men in the same level with mechanics,
so.
## p. 2492 (#52) ############################################
2492
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and
their purses compound for their follies.
1
1
I must give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but
to fulfill and accomplish the will and command of my God: I
draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that
enjoined it; I believe no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries,
nor to content mine own commiserating disposition; for this is
still but moral charity, and an act that oweth more to passion
than reason. He that relieves another upon the bare suggestion
and bowels of pity doth not this so much for his sake as for
his own; for by compassion we make others' misery our own, and
so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also. It is as erro-
neous a conceit to redress other men's misfortunes upon the com-
mon considerations of merciful natures, that it may be one day
our own case; for this is a sinister and politic kind of charity,
whereby we seem to bespeak the pities of men in the like occas-
ions. And truly I have observed that those professed eleemosy-
naries, though in a crowd or multitude, do yet direct and place
their petitions on a few and selected persons: there is surely a
physiognomy which those experienced and master mendicants
observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and
will single out a face wherein they spy the signatures and marks
of mercy.
For there are mystically in our faces certain characters
which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that can-
not read A B C may read our natures. I hold moreover that
there is a phytognomy, or physiognomy, not only of men, but of
plants and vegetables; and in every one of them some outward
figures which hang as signs or bushes of their inward forms.
The finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his works,
not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms,
constitutions, parts and operations, which, aptly joined together,
do make one word that doth express their natures. By these
letters God calls the stars by their names; and by this alphabet
Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its nature.
Now there are, besides these characters in our faces, certain
mystical figures in our hands, which I dare not call mere dashes,
strokes à la volée, or at random, because delineated by a pencil
that never works in vain; and hereof I take more particular
notice, because I carry that in mine own hand which I could
never read of or discover in another. Aristotle, I confess, in his
## p. 2493 (#53) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2493
acute and singular book of physiognomy, hath made no mention
of chiromancy; yet I believe the Egyptians, who were nearer
addicted to those abstruse and mystical sciences, had a knowledge
therein, to which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did
after pretend, and perhaps retained a few corrupted principles
which sometimes might verify their prognostics.
It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many
millions of faces, there should be none alike. Now, contrary, I
wonder as much how there should be any: he that shall consider
how many thousand several words have been carelessly and with-
out study composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many
hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabric of one man, shall
easily find that this variety is necessary; and it will be very hard
that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another.
Let a painter carelessly limn out a million of faces, and you shall
find them all different; yea, let him have his copy before him, yet
after all his art there will remain a sensible distinction; for the
pattern or example of everything is the perfectest in that kind,
whereof we still come short, though we transcend or go beyond
it, because herein it is wide, and agrees not in all points unto
Nor doth the similitude of creatures disparage the
variety of nature, nor any way confound the works of God. For
even in things alike there is diversity; and those that do seem to
accord do manifestly disagree. And thus is man like God; for in
the same things that we resemble him we are utterly different
from him. There was never anything so like another as in all
points to concur; there will ever some reserved difference slip in,
to prevent the identity, without which two several things would
not be alike, but the same, which is impossible.
its copy.
Naturally amorous of all that is beautiful, I can look a whole
day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of
an horse. It is my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all
harmony; and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the
silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an
instrument: for there is music wherever there is harmony, order,
or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the
spheres; for those well-ordered motions and regular paces, though
they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they
strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically,
composed, delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust
## p. 2494 (#54) ############################################
}
5
2494
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church
music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my partic-
ular genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and tavern
music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me
a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First
Composer; there is something in it of divinity more than the ear
discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the
whole world and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as
the whole world, well understood, would afford the understand-
ing In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intel-
lectually sounds in the ears of God. It unties the ligaments of
my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by
degrees, methinks, resolves me into heaven.
I will not say,
with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its
nearest sympathy unto music; thus some, whose temper of body
agrees and humors the constitution of their souls, are born
poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.
There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that de-
lights us in our dreams than in our waked senses: without this,
I were unhappy; for my awaked judgment discontents me, ever
whispering unto me that I am from my friend; but my friendly
dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within
his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my
good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable
desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and
surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep
in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere
dreams to those of the next; as the phantasms of the night to
the conceits of the day. There is an equal delusion in both, and
the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other;
are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the
slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul.
It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our
waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At
my nativity my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I
was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor
disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one
dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, and
apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits
we
## p. 2495 (#55) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2495
thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then
fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time
also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories
have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings that
they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a
confused and broken tale of that that hath passed. Aristotle,
who hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not, methinks,
thoroughly defined it; nor yet Galen, though he seem to have
corrected it: for those noctambuloes and night-walkers, though
in their sleep do yet enjoy the action of their senses; we must
therefore say that there is something in us that is not in the
jurisdiction of Morpheus; and that those abstracted and ecstatic
souls do walk about in their own corps, as spirits with the bodies
they assume, wherein they seem to hear, see, and feel, though
indeed the organs are destitute of sense, and their natures of
those faculties that should inform them. Thus it is observed
that men sometimes, upon the hour of their departure, do speak
and reason above themselves. For then the soul, beginning to
be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like
herself, and to discourse in a strain above mortality.
FROM (CHRISTIAN MORALS)
WHEN
HEN thou lookest upon the imperfections of others, allow
one eye for what is laudable in them, and the balance
they have from some excellency, which may render them
considerable. While we look with fear or hatred upon the teeth
of the viper, we may behold his eye with love. In venomous
natures something may be amiable: poisons afford anti-poisons:
nothing is totally or altogether uselessly bad. Notable virtues
are sometimes dashed with notorious vices, and in some vicious
tempers have been found illustrious acts of virtue, which makes
such observable worth in some actions of King Demetrius, An-
tonius, and Ahab, as are not to be found in the same kind in
Aristides, Numa, or David. Constancy, generosity, clemency,
and liberality have been highly conspicuous in some persons not
marked out in other concerns for example or imitation. But
since goodness is exemplary in all, if others have not our vir-
tues, let us not be wanting in theirs; nor, scorning them for
their vices whereof we are free, be condemned by their virtues
## p. 2496 (#56) ############################################
2496
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
wherein we are deficient. There is dross, alloy, and embasement
in all human tempers; and he flieth without wings, who thinks
to find ophir or pure metal in any. For perfection is not, like
light, centred in any one body; but, like the dispersed seminal-
ities of vegetables at the creation, scattered through the whole
mass of the earth, no place producing all, and almost all some.
So that 'tis well if a perfect man can be made out of many
men, and to the perfect eye of God, even out of mankind.
Time, which perfects some things, imperfects also others. Could
we intimately apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in
the intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we might
more narrowly comprehend our present degeneration, and how
widely we are fallen from the pure exemplar and idea of our
nature: for after this corruptive elongation, from a primitive and
pure creation we are almost lost in degeneration; and Adam
hath not only fallen from his Creator, but we ourselves from
Adam, our Tycho and primary generator.
If generous honesty, valor, and plain dealing be the cog-
nizance of thy family or characteristic of thy country, hold fast
such inclinations sucked in with thy first breath, and which lay
in the cradle with thee.
Fall not into transforming degenera-
tions, which under the old name create a new nation. Be not
an alien in thine own nation; bring not Orontes into Tiber;
learn the virtues, not the vices, of thy foreign neighbors, and
make thy imitation by discretion, not contagion. Feel something
of thyself in the noble acts of thy ancestors, and find in thine
own genius that of thy predecessors. Rest not under the ex-
pired merits of others; shine by those of thine own.
Flame not,
like the central fire which enlighteneth no eyes, which no man
seeth, and most men think there is no such thing to be seen.
Add one ray unto the common lustre; add not only to the num-
ber, but the note of thy generation; and prove not a cloud, but
an asterisk in thy region.
Since thou hast an alarum in thy breast, which tells thee
thou hast a living spirit in thee above two thousand times in an
hour, dull not away thy days in slothful supinity and the tedious-
ness of doing nothing. To strenuous minds there is an inquiet-
ude in overquietness and no laboriousness in labor; and to
tread a mile after the slow pace of a snail, or the heavy meas-
ures of the lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring penance, and
worse than a race of some furlongs at the Olympics. The
## p. 2497 (#57) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2497
rapid courses of the heavenly bodies are rather imitable by our
thoughts than our corporeal motions; yet the solemn motions
of our lives amount unto a greater measure than is commonly
apprehended. Some few men have surrounded the globe of the
earth; yet many, in the set locomotions and movements of their
days, have measured the circuit of it, and twenty thousand miles
have been exceeded by them. Move circumspectly, not meticu-
lously, and rather carefully solicitous than anxiously solicitudi-
nous. Think not there is a lion in the way, nor walk with
leaden sandals in the paths of goodness; but in all virtuous
motions let prudence determine thy measures. Strive not to
run, like Hercules, a furlong in a breath: festination may prove
precipitation; deliberating delay may be wise cunctation, and
slowness no slothfulness.
Despise not the obliquities of younger ways, nor despair of
better things whereof there is yet no prospect. Who would
imagine that Diogenes, who in his younger days was a falsifier
of money, should, in the after course of his life, be so great a
contemner of metal? Some negroes, who believe the resurrection,
think that they shall rise white. Even in this life regeneration
may imitate resurrection; our black and vicious tinctures may
wear off, and goodness clothe us with candor, Good admoni-
tions knock not always in vain. There will be signal examples
of God's mercy, and the angels must not want their charitable
rejoices for the conversion of lost sinners. Figures of most
angles do nearest approach unto circles, which have no angles at
all. Some may be near unto goodness who are conceived far
from it; and many things happen not likely to ensue from any
promises of antecedencies. Culpable beginnings have found com-
mendable conclusions, and infamous courses pious retractations.
Detestable sinners have proved exemplary converts on earth, and
may be glorious in the apartment of Mary Magdalen in heaven.
Men are not the same through all divisions of their ages: time,
experience, self-reflections, and God's mercies, make in some
well-tempered minds a kind of translation before death, and men
to differ from themselves as well as from other persons. Hereof
the old world afforded many examples to the infamy of latter
ages, wherein men too often live by the rule of their inclina-
tions; so that, without any astral prediction, the first day gives
the last: men are commonly as they were; or rather, as bad
V-157
## p. 2498 (#58) ############################################
2498
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
|
1
1
dispositions run into worser habits, the evening doth not crown,
but sourly conclude, the day.
If the Almighty will not spare us according to his merciful
capitulation at Sodom; if his goodness please not to pass over a
great deal of bad for a small pittance of good, or to look upon
us in the lump, there is slender hope for mercy, or sound pre-
sumption of fulfilling half his will, either in persons or nations:
they who excel in some virtues being so often defective in
others; few men driving at the extent and amplitude of good-
ness, but computing themselves by their best parts, and others
by their worst, are content to rest in those virtues which others
commonly want. Which makes this speckled face of honesty in
the world; and which was the imperfection of the old philoso-
phers and great pretenders unto virtue; who, well declining the
gaping vices of intemperance, incontinency, violence, and oppres-
sion, were yet blindly peccant in iniquities of closer faces; were
envious, malicious, contemners, scoffers, censurers, and stuffed
with vizard vices, no less depraving the ethereal particle and
diviner portion of man. For envy, malice, hatred, are the qual-
ities of Satan, close and dark like himself; and where such
brands smoke, the soul cannot be white. Vice may be had at
all prices; expensive and costly iniquities, which make the noise,
cannot be every man's sins; but the soul may be foully inqui-
nated at a very low rate, and a man may be cheaply vicious to
the perdition of himself.
Having been long tossed in the ocean of the world, he will
by that time feel the in-draught of another, unto which this
seems but preparatory and without it of no high value. He will
experimentally find the emptiness of all things, and the noth-
ing of what is past; and wisely grounding upon true Christian
expectations, finding so much past, will wholly fix upon what is
to come. He will long for perpetuity, and live as though he .
made haste to be happy. The last may prove the prime part of
his life, and those his best days which he lived nearest heaven.
Live happy in the Elysium of a virtuously composed mind,
and let intellectual contents exceed the delights wherein mere
pleasurists place their paradise. Bear not too slack reins upon
pleasure, nor let complexion or contagion betray thee unto the
exorbitancy of delight. Make pleasure thy recreation or inter-
missive relaxation, not thy Diana, life, and profession. Volup-
tuousness is as insatiable as covetousness. Tranquillity is better
1
1
## p. 2499 (#59) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2499
we
a
race
than jollity, and to appease pain than to invent pleasure. Our
hard entrance into the world, our miserable going out of it, our
sicknesses, disturbances, and sad rencounters in it, do clamor-
ously tell us came not into the world to run
of
delight, but to perform the sober acts and serious purposes of
man; which to omit were foully to miscarry in the advantage
of humanity, to play away an uniterable life, and to have lived
in vain. Forget not the capital end, and frustrate not the oppor-
tunity of once living. Dream not of any kind of metempsychosis
or transanimation, but into thine own body, and that after a
long time; and then also unto wail or bliss, according to thy first
and fundamental life. Upon a curricle in this world depends a
long course of the next, and upon a narrow scene here an end-
less expansion hereafter. In vain some think to have an end of
their beings with their lives. Things cannot get out of their
natures, or be, or not be, in despite of their constitutions. .
Rational existences in heaven perish not at all, and but partially
on earth; that which is thus once, will in some way be always;
the first living human soul is still alive, and all Adam hath
found no period.
Since the stars of heaven do differ in glory; since it hath ·
pleased the Almighty hand to honor the north pole with lights
above the south; since there are some stars so bright that they
can hardly be looked upon, some so dim that they can scarcely
be seen, and vast numbers not to be seen at all even by arti-
ficial eyes; read thou the earth in heaven and things below
from above. Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of
things, and expect not equality in lustre, dignity, or perfection,
in regions or persons below; where numerous numbers must
be content to stand like lacteous or nebulous stars, little taken
notice of, or dim in their generations. All which may be con-
tentedly allowable in the affairs and ends of this world, and in
suspension unto what will be in the order of things hereafter,
and the new system of mankind which will be in the world to
come; when the last may be the first, and the first the last;
when Lazarus may sit above Cæsar, and the just, obscure on
earth, shall shine like the sun in heaven; when personations shall
cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall
rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever.
## p. 2500 (#60) ############################################
2500
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
FROM HYDRIOTAPHIA, OR URN-BURIAL)
IN
1
THE Jewish Hypogæum and subterranean cell at Rome was
little observable beside the variety of lamps and frequent
draughts of the holy candlestick. In authentic draughts of
Antony and Jerome, we meet with thigh bones and death's-
heads; but the cemeterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs
were filled with draughts of Scripture stories; not declining the
flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures
of peacocks, doves, and cocks; but iterately affecting the por-
traits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as
hopeful draughts and hinting imagery of the resurrection -- which
is the life of the grave and sweetens our habitations in the land
of moles and pismires.
The particulars of future beings must needs be dark unto
ancient theories, which Christian philosophy yet determines but
in a cloud of opinions. A dialogue between two infants in the
womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely
illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet
discourse in Plato's den, and are but embryon philosophers.
Pythagoras escapes, in the fabulous hell of Dante, among
that swarm of philosophers, wherein, whilst we meet with Plato
and Socrates, Cato is to be found in no lower place than Pur-
gatory. Among all the set, Epicurus is most considerable,
whom men make honest without an Elysium, who contemned
life without encouragement of immortality, and making nothing
after death, yet made nothing of the king of terrors.
Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended
as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto
such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to
die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be
nothing and return into their chaos again. Certainly, such spirits
as could contemn death, when they expected no better being
after, would have scorned to live had they known any. And'
therefore we applaud not the judgments of Machiavel that
Christianity makes men cowards, or that with the confidence of
but half dying, the despised virtues of patience and humility
have abased the spirits of men, which pagan principles exalted;
but rather regulated the wildness of audacities, in the attempts,
grounds, and eternal sequels of death, wherein men of the boldest
## p. 2501 (#61) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2501
we
exten-
spirits are often prodigiously temerarious. Nor can
uate the valor of ancient martyrs, who contemned death in the
uncomfortable scene of their lives, and in their decrepit martyr-
doms did probably lose not many months of their days, or parted
with life when it was scarce worth the living; for (beside that
long time past holds no consideration unto a slender time to
come) they had no small disadvantage from the constitution of
old age, which naturally makes men fearful, and complexionally
superannuated from the bold and courageous thoughts of youth
and fervent years. But the contempt of death from corporal
animosity promoteth not our felicity.
our felicity. They may sit in the
orchestra and noblest seats of heaven who have held up shaking
hands in the fire, and humanly contended for glory.
Meanwhile, Epicurus lies deep in Dante's hell, wherein we
meet with tombs inclosing souls which denied their immortal-
ities. But whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than
he spake, or, erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above
philosophers of more specious maxims, lie so deep as he is
placed; at least so low as not to rise against Christians who,
believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their
practice and conversation -
were a query too sad to insist on.
But all or most apprehensions rested in opinions of some
future being, which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those
perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which Christians pity
or laugh at. Happy are they which live not in that disadvantage
of time, when men could say little for futurity but from reason;
whereby the noblest minds fell often upon doubtful deaths and
melancholy dissolutions. With those hopes Socrates warmed his
doubtful spirits against that cold potion; and Cato, before he
durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading the
immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto
the animosity of that attempt.
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man,
to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is
no farther state to come, unto which this seems progressional,
and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the
natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy
in nature. Unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justice
of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen
lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper igno-
rance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of
## p. 2502 (#62) ############################################
2502
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
1
inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions,
as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures;
and being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or
cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated
their contentment. But the superior ingredient and obscured part
of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting con-
tentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than our
present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their
own accomplishments.
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and
deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of
perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids ?
Erostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana; he is almost
lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's
horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felici-
ties by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal
durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.
Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there
be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand re-
membered in the known account of time? Without the favor of
the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as
the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content
to be as though they had not been; to be found in the register
of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up
the first story, and the recorded names ever since contain not one
living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that
shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day; and who
knows when was the equinox ? Every hour adds unto that cur-
rent arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. And since •
death must be the Lucina of life, and even pagans could doubt
whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at
right declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it ·
cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our
light in ashes;* since the brother of death daily haunts us with
dying mementos, and time, that grows old itself, bids us hope no
long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.
Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
shares with memory a great part even of our living beings. We
* According to the custom of the Jews, who placed a lighted wax candle
in a pot of ashes by the corpse.
1
1
1
1
## p. 2503 (#63) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2503
slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of afflic-
tion leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extrem-
ities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones
are fables.
Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery,
or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy
stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils
past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the
mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered senses not
relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept
raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity con-
tented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their
souls; a good way to continue their memories, while, having the
advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something
remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of
their passed selves, making accumulation of glory unto their last
durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night
of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and
make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no
more than to return into their unknown and divine original again.
Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies
in sweet consistencies to attend the return of their souls. But all
was vanity, feeding the wind and folly. The Egyptian mummies,
which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth.
Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and
Pharaoh is sold for balsams.
There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever
hath no beginning may be confident of no end, which is the
peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself, and
the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted,
as not to suffer even from the power of itself. All others have
a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction. But
the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly
glory, and the quality of either state after death makes a folly of
posthumous memory. God, who can only destroy our souls, and
hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath
directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of
chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustra-
tion; and to hold long subsistence seems but a scape in oblivion.
But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in •
the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor
omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.
## p. 2504 (#64) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2 504
us.
1
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within
A small fire sufficeth for life; great flames seemed too little
after death, while men vainly affected pyres, and to burn like
Sardanapalus. But the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly
of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires into the rule of
sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide
wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.
While some have studied monuments, others have studiously
declined them; and some have been so vainly boisterous, that
they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein Alaricus seems
more subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at the
bottom. Even Sylla, who thought himself safe in his urn, could
not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his monu-
ment. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal
so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them
in the next; who when they die make no commotion among the
dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.
Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of
vainglory and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the
most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion,
which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition,
humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity unto which all others
must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of
contingency.
Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity,
made little more of this world than the world that was before it,
while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination and night
of their forebeings. And if any have been so happy as truly to
understand Christian annihilation, ecstasis, exolution, liquefac-
tion, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God,
and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had a
handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely
over, and the earth in ashes unto them.
1
1
1
1
1
## p. 2505 (#65) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2505
FROM CA FRAGMENT ON MUMMIES).
ISE Egypt, prodigal of her embalmments, wrapped up her
princes and great commanders in aromatical folds, and,
studiously extracting from corruptible bodies their cor-
ruption, ambitiously looked forward to immortality; from which
vainglory we have become acquainted with many remnants of
the old world, who could discourse unto us of the great things
of yore, and tell us strange tales of the sons of Mizraim and
ancient braveries of Egypt. Wonderful indeed are the preserves
of time, which openeth unto us mummies from crypts and pyra-
mids, and mammoth bones from caverns and excavations; whereof
man hath found the best preservation, appearing unto us in some
sort fleshly, while beasts must be fain of an osseous continuance.
In what original this practice of the Egyptians had root,
divers authors dispute; while some place the origin hereof in the
desire to prevent the separation of the soul by keeping the body
untabified, and alluring the spiritual part to remain by sweet and
precious odors. But all this was but fond inconsideration. The
soul, having broken its
is not stayed by bands and
cerecloths, nor to be recalled by Sabæan odors, but fleeth to the
place of invisibles, the ubi of spirits, and needeth a surer than
Hermes's seal to imprison it to its medicated trunk, which yet
subsists anomalously in its indestructible case, and, like a widow
looking for her husband, anxiously awaits its return.
That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly deliver-
eth, and divers confirms; but of the particular uses thereof, there
is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes
the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use
thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic,
and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood.
Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First of France, who
always carried mummies with him as a panacea against all dis-
orders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out,
scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding
the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes unto un-
worthy potions. Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirur-
geons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammitticus be weighed
unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in
electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely,
such diet is dismal vampirism, and exceeds in horror the black
## p. 2506 (#66) ############################################
2506
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled except in those Ara-
bian feasts, wherein Ghoules feed horribly.
But the common opinion of the virtues of mummy bred great
consumption thereof, and princes and great men contended for
this strange panacea, wherein Jews dealt largely, manufacturing
mummies from dead carcasses and giving them the names of
kings, while specifics were compounded from crosses and gibbet
leavings. There wanted not a set of Arabians who counterfeited
mummies so accurately that it needed great skill to distinguish
the false from the true. Queasy stomachs would hardly fancy
the doubtful potion, wherein one might so easily swallow a cloud
for his Juno, and defraud the fowls of the air while in conceit
enjoying the conserves of Canopus.
For those dark caves and mummy repositories are Satan's
abodes, wherein he speculates and rejoices on human vainglory,
and keeps those kings and conquerors, whom alive he bewitched,
whole for that great day when he will claim his own, and
marshal the kings of Nilus and Thebes in sad procession unto
the pit.
Death, that fatal necessity which so many would overlook or
blinkingly survey, the old Egyptians held continually before their
eyes. Their embalmed ancestors they carried about at their ban-
quets, as holding them still a part of their families, and not
thrusting them from their places at feasts, They wanted not
likewise a sad preacher at their tables to admonish them daily of
death, --surely an unnecessary discourse while they banqueted in
sepulchres. Whether this were not making too much of death,
as tending to assuefaction, some reason there is to doubt; but
certain it is that such practices would hardly be embraced by
our modern gourmands, who like not to look on faces of mortua,
or be elbowed by mummies.
Yet in those huge structures and pyramidal immensities, of
the builders whereof so little is known, they seemed not so much
to raise sepulchres or temples to death as to contemn and dis-
dain it, astonishing heaven with their audacities, and looking
forward with delight to their interment in those eternal piles.
Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of
them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres
of the dead, and, planting thereon lasting bases, defied the crum-
bling touches of time and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet
all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things,
1
## p. 2507 (#67) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2507
and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh
unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth
semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puz-
zles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams.
History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveler, as he paceth
amazedly through those deserts, asketh of her, Who builded them?
and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.
Egypt itself is now become the land of obliviousness, and
doteth. Her ancient civility is gone, and her glory hath van-
ished as a phantasma. Her youthful days are over, and her
face hath become wrinkled and tetric. She poreth not upon the
heavens; astronomy is dead unto her, and knowledge maketh
other cycles. Canopus is afar off, Memnon resoundeth not to the
sun, and Nilus heareth strange voices. Her monuments are but
hieroglyphically sempiternal. Osiris and Anubis, her averruncous
deities, have departed, while Orus yet remains dimly shadowing
the principle of vicissitude and the effluxion of things, but re-
ceiveth little oblation.
FROM A LETTER TO A FRIEND)
HE
E WAS willing to quit the world alone and altogether, leaving
no earnest behind him for corruption or after-grave, having
small content in that common satisfaction to survive or
live in another, but amply satisfied that his disease should die
with himself, nor revive in a posterity to puzzle physic, and
make sad mementos of their parent hereditary.
In this deliberate and creeping progress unto the grave, he
was somewhat too young and of too noble a mind to fall upon
that stupid symptom observable in divers persons near their
journey's end, and which may be reckoned among the mortal
symptoms of their last disease; that is, to become more narrow-
minded, miserable, and tenacious, unready to part with anything
when they are ready to part with all, and afraid to want
when they have no time to spend; meanwhile physicians, who
know that many are mad but in a single depraved imagination,
and one prevalent decipiency, and that beside and out of such
single deliriums a man may meet with sober actions and good
sense in Bedlam, cannot but smile to see the heirs and concerned
relations gratulating themselves on the sober departure of their
## p. 2508 (#68) ############################################
2508
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
friends; and though they behold such mad covetous passages, con-
tent to think they die in good understanding, and in their sober
senses.
Avarice, which is not only infidelity but idolatry, either from
covetous progeny or questuary education, had no root in his
breast, who made good works the expression of his faith, and
was big with desires unto public and lasting charities; and surely,
where good wishes and charitable intentions exceed abilities, the-
orical beneficency may be more than a dream. They build not
castles in the air who would build churches on earth; and though
they leave no such structures here, may lay good foundations
in heaven. In brief, his life and death were such that I could
not blame them who wished the like, and almost to have been
himself: almost, I say; for though we may wish the prosperous
appurtenances of others, or to be another in his happy accidents,
yet so intrinsical is every man unto himself that some doubt
may be made whether any would exchange his being, or sub-
stantially become another man.
He had wisely seen the world at home and abroad, and
thereby observed under what variety men are deluded in the
pursuit of that which is not here to be found. And although he
had no opinion of reputed felicities below, and apprehended men
widely out in the estimate of such happiness, yet his sober con-
tempt of the world wrought no Democritism or Cynicism, no
laughing or snarling at it, as well understanding there are not
felicities in this world to satisfy a serious mind; and therefore,
to soften the stream of our lives, we are fain to take in the re-
puted contentions of this world, to unite with the crowd in their
beatitudes, and to make ourselves happy by consortion, opinion,
or co-existimation: for strictly to separate from received and
customary felicities, and to confine unto the rigor of realities,
were to contract the consolation of our beings unto too uncom-
fortable circumscriptions.
Not to be content with life is the unsatisfactory state of those
who destroy themselves; who, being afraid to live, run blindly
upon their own death, which no man fears by experience: and
the Stoics had a notable doctrine to take away the fear thereof;
that is, in such extremities, to desire that which is not to be
avoided, and wish what might be feared; and so made evils vol.
untary and to suit with their own desires, which took off the
terror of them.
1
## p. 2509 (#69) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2509
But the ancient martyrs were not encouraged by such falla-
cies, who, though they feared not death, were afraid to be their
own executioners; and therefore thought it more wisdom to
crucify their lusts than their bodies, to circumcise than stab their
hearts, and to mortify than kill themselves.
His willingness to leave this world about that age when most
men think they may best enjoy it, though paradoxical unto
worldly ears, was not strange unto mine, who have so often
observed that many, though old, oft stick fast unto the world,
and seem to be drawn like Cacus's oxen, backward with great
struggling and reluctancy unto the grave. The long habit of
living makes mere men more hardly to part with life, and all to
be nothing, but what is to come. To live at the rate of the old
world, when some could scarce remember themselves young, may
afford no better digested death than a more moderate period.
Many would have thought it an happiness to have had their lot
of life in some notable conjunctures of ages past; but the uncer-
tainty of future times hath tempted few to make a part in ages
to come. And surely, he that hath taken the true altitude of
things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this age, is
not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less
three or four hundred years hence, when no man can comfort-
ably imagine what face this world will carry; and therefore, since
every age makes a step unto the end of all things, and the Script-
ure affords so hard a character of the last times, quiet minds
will be content with their generations, and rather bless ages past
than be ambitious of those to come.
Though age had set no seal upon his face, yet a dim eye
might clearly discover fifty in his actions; and therefore, since
wisdom is the gray hair, and an unspotted life old age, although
his years came short, he might have been said to have held up
with longer livers, and to have been Solomon's old man. And
surely if we deduct all those days of our life which we might
wish unlived, and which abate the comfort of those we now live,
if we reckon up only those days which God hath accepted of
our lives, a life of good years will hardly be a span long; the
son in this sense may outlive the father, and none be climac-
terically old. He that early arriveth unto the parts and prudence
of age is happily old without the uncomfortable attendants of it;
and 'tis superfluous to live unto gray hairs, when in a precocious
temper we anticipate the virtues of them. In brief, he cannot
## p. 2510 (#70) ############################################
2510
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
be accounted young who outliveth the old man. He that hath
early arrived unto the measure of a perfect stature in Christ,
hath already fulfilled the prime and longest intention of his
being; and one day lived after the perfect rule of piety is to be
preferred before sinning immortality.
Although he attained not unto the years of his predecessors,
yet he wanted not those preserving virtues which confirm the
thread of weaker constitutions. Cautelous chastity and crafty
sobriety were far from him; those jewels were paragon, without
flaw, hair, ice, or cloud in him: which affords me a hint to pro-
ceed in these good wishes and few mementos unto you.
SOME RELATIONS WHOSE TRUTH WE FEAR
From (Pseudoxia Epidemica'
M*
1
ANY other accounts like these we meet sometimes in history,
scandalous unto Christianity, and even unto humanity;
whose verities not only, but whose relations, honest minds
do deprecate. For of sins heteroclital, and such as want either
name or precedent, there is ofttimes a sin even in their histories.
We desire no records of such enormities; sins should be accounted
new, that so they may be esteemed monstrous. They amit of
monstrosity as they fall from their rarity; for men count it
venial to err with their forefathers, and foolishly conceive they
divide a sin in its society. The pens of men may sufficiently
expatiate without these singularities of villainy; for as they
increase the hatred of vice in some, so do they enlarge the
theory of wickedness in all. And this is one thing that may
make latter ages worse than were the former; for the vicious
examples of ages past poison the curiosity of these present,
affording a hint of sin unto seducible spirits, and soliciting those
unto the imitation of them, whose heads were
so per-
versely principled as to invent them. In this kind we commend
the wisdom and goodness of Galen, who would not leave unto
the world too subtle a theory of poisons; unarming thereby the
malice of venomous spirits, whose ignorance must be contented
with sublimate and arsenic.
For surely there are subtler ven-
erations, such as will invisibly destroy, and like the basilisks of
heaven. In things of this nature silence commendeth history:
'tis the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must never
rise a Pancirollus, nor remain any register but that of hell
never
1
1
1
## p. 2511 (#71) ############################################
2511
WILLIAM BROWNE
(1591-1643)
MONG the English poets famous for their imaginative interpre-
tation of nature, high rank must be given to William
Browne, who belongs in the list headed by Spenser, and
including Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton, George
Wither, and Phineas Fletcher. Although he shows skill and charm
of style in various kinds of verse, his name rests chiefly upon his
largest work, Britannia's Pastorals. This is much wider in
scope
than the title suggests, if one follows the definition given by Pope in
his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. ' He says:— “A Pastoral is an
imitation of the action of a shepherd or one considered under that
character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or , narrated, or
mixed of both; the fable simple, the manners not too polite nor too
rustic; the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and pas-
sion.
If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this
Idea along with us: that Pastoral is an image of what they call the
Golden Age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shep-
herds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to
have been when the best of men followed the employment.
We must therefore use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful,
and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life,
and in concealing its miseries.
How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases
which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and
sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and
lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as
verse.
«Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the
grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omit-
ting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;) ( When
personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when
reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:” — such
passages as these, and the whole of the Fragment on Mummies,' one
can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which
the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.
That the Religio Medici? was the work of a gentleman before
his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active
in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties
of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, I have shaken hands
with delight [sc. by way of parting] in my warm blood and canic-
ular days. ” So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so.
austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of
those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind.
Its
frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been
compared with Montaigne's: if Montaigne had been graduated after a
due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely
crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the fluctus
decumanus gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would
have been closer.
«The Religio Medici,” says Coleridge, is a fine portrait of a
handsome man in his best clothes. " There is truth in the criticism,
and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who
does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden,
that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of
the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and
a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?
This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart in the still air
of delightful studies,” is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He
thinks his thoughts in his own way, and the style is the man”
never more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions
the execution of Charles I. as a “horrid murther, and another speaks
## p. 2480 (#40) ############################################
2480
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
as
of Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the
public eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultu-
ous and heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that
Shakespeare was of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton
and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the par-
allels in their thought and feeling and in his, were his contempo-
raries. Constant and extensive as are his excursions into ancient
literature, it is rare for him to make any reference to writers of his
own time.
Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great
names of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries.
His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute
observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of
our modern school:-“What is the use of dew-claws in dogs? ” He
does not instantly answer, a schoolboy in this Darwinian day
would, “To carry out an analogy; but the mere asking of the ques-
tion sets him ahead of his age. See too his curious inquiries into the
left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and
squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician
Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value: “his piece De
Circul. Sang. ,' which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus. ” And
here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved
a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur - concerning
canine madness, whether it holdeth not better at second than at
first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the
evil proves less considerable. ” He is the first to observe and describe
that curious product of the decomposition of flesh known to modern
chemists as adipocere.
He is full of eager anticipation of the future. "Join sense unto
reason,” he cries, and experiment unto speculation, and so give life
unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.
What
libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new
world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few
ages may joyfully declare. ”
But acute and active as our author's perceptions were, they did
not prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to
the devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part
in the economy of the world. This belief affords so easy a solution
of some problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may
look back with envy upon those who held it in serene and comfort-
able possession.
It is to be regretted, however, that the eminent Lord Chief Justice
Hale in 1664, presiding at the trial for witchcraft of two women,
should have called Dr. Browne, apparently as amicus curia, to give
## p. 2481 (#41) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2481
his view of the fits which were supposed to be the work of the
witches. He was clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more
to do with that case than he has with most cases of hysteria; and
consequently the witches, it must be said, fared no better in Sir
Matthew Hale's court than many of their kind in various parts of
Christendom about the same time. But it would be unreasonable for
us to hold the ghost of Sir Thomas deeply culpable because, while
he showed in most matters an exceptionally enlightened liberality of
opinion and practice, in this one particular he declined to deny the
scientific dictum of previous ages and the popular belief of his own
time.
The mental attitude of reverent belief in its symbolic value, in
which this devout philosopher contemplated the material world, is
that of inany of those who have since helped most to build the
structure of Natural Science. The rapturous exclamation of Linnæus,
“My God, I think thy thoughts after thee! ) comes like an antiph-
onal response by “the man of flowers to these passages in the
(Religio Medici? : « This visible world is but a picture of the invisi-
ble, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal
shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible
fabric. ” “Things are really true as they correspond unto God's con-
ception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity unto
that intellect, in whose idea they had their first determinations. )
his. Bacon
FROM THE RELIGIO MEDICI
I
Could never divide myself from any man upon the difference
of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agree-
ing with me in that from which within a few days I should
dissent myself. I have no genius to disputes in religion, and
have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a
disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the
weakness of my patronage. Where we desire to be informed, 'tis
good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and
establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below
our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons
may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our
own. Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to
take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity: many from the
V-156
## p. 2482 (#42) ############################################
2482
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
as
ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal for truth,
have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain
trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just
possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender;
'tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazard
her on a battle: if therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I
do forget them, or at least defer them, till my better settled
judgment and more manly reason be able to resolve them; for I
perceive every man's own reason is his best Edipus, and will,
upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds where-
with the subtleties of error have enchained our more flexible and
tender judgments. In philosophy, where truth seems double-
faced, there is no more paradoxical than myself: but in
divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit,
yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by
which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the
epicycle of my own brain: by these means I leave no gap for
heresy, schisms, or errors.
man
As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties
in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they
never stretched the pia mater of mine: methinks there be not
impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deep-
est mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but
maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose
myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those
involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation
and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and
my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Ter-
tullian, “Certum est quia impossibile est. ” I desire to exercise
my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and vis-
ible objects is not faith, but persuasion. Some believe the better
for seeing Christ's sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red
Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself
and am thankful that I live not in the days of miracles, that I
never saw Christ nor his disciples; I would not have been one
of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ's
patients on whom he wrought his wonders: then had my faith
been thrust upon me; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing
pronounced to all that believe and saw not. 'Tis an easy and
## p. 2483 (#43) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2483
necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath exam-
ined: I believe he was dead and buried, and rose again; and
desire to see him in his glory, rather than to contemplate him
in his cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe; as
we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they only had
the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his
coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could
raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.
In my solitary and retired imagination,
“Neque enim cum lectulus aut me
Porticus excepit, desum mihi”.
a
I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contem-
plate Him and his attributes who is ever with me, especially
those two mighty ones, His wisdom and eternity: with the one I
recreate, with the other I confound my understanding; for who
can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think thereof with-
out an ecstasy ? Time we may comprehend: it is but five days
older than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world;
but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give
such an infinite start forward as to conceive an end in an
essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it
puts my reason to St. Paul's sanctuary: my philosophy dares
not say the angels can do it; God hath not made a creature that
can comprehend him; it is a privilege of his own nature: I am .
that I am, was his own definition unto Moses; and it was
short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God or
ask him what he was. Indeed he only is; all others have and
shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and
therefore that terrible term predestination, which hath troubled
so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in
respect to God no prescious determination of our states to come,
but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the
instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indi-
visible and all together, the last trump is already sounded, the
reprobates in the flame and the blessed in Abraham's bosom.
St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, a thousand years to
God are but as one day; for to speak like a philosopher, those
continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years
make not to him one moment: what to us is to come, to his
## p. 2484 (#44) ############################################
2484
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent
point, without succession, parts, flux, or division.
we owe
The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied
and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason
unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without
this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was
before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that
could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God
receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare
about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works: those highly
magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and delib-
erate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and
learned admiration.
«Natura nihil agit frustra,” is the only indisputable axiom
in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature; not anything
framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces: in the
most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in
the ark, but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of
nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is— in these
is the wisdom of His hand discovered; out of this rank Solomon
chose the object of his admiration; indeed, what reason may not
go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders ? what wise
hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder
heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature — whales,
elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the
colossi and majestic pieces of her hand: but in these narrow
engines there is more curious mathematics; and the civility of
these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their
Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his fly beyond his
eagle, or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those
little bodies, than but one in the trunk of a cedar? I could
never content my contemplation with those general pieces of
wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile,
the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to
match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected
pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the
cosmography of myself: we carry with us the wonders we seek
without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are
that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies
## p. 2485 (#45) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2485
wisely learns in a compendium, what others labor at in a divided
piece and endless volume.
Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity:
besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature,
that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the
eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one have discovered
him in the other. This was the Scripture and Theology of the
heathens: the natural motion of the sun made them more admire
him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel; the
ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them than
in the other all his miracles: surely the heathens knew better
how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians,
who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics and
disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature. Nor do I so
forget God as to adore the name of nature; which I define not,
with the schools, to be the principle of motion and rest, but that
straight and regular line, that settled and constant course the
wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures, accord-
ing to their several kinds. To make a revolution every day is
the nature of the sun, because of that necessary course which
God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve but by a
faculty from that voice which first did give it motion. Now this
course of nature God seldom alters or perverts, but, like an excel-
lent artist, hath so contrived his work that with the selfsame
instrument, without a new creation, he may effect his obscurest
designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a wood, preserveth
the creatures in the ark, which the blast of his mouth might
have as easily created; for God is like a skillful geometrician, who
when more easily, and with one stroke of his compass, he might
describe or divide a right line, had yet rather to do this in a
circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid
principles of his art: yet this rule of his he doth sometimes per-
vert to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arro-
gancy of our reason should question his power and conclude he
could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of
God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to
ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honor of the prin-
cipal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may
do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our
houses, and our pens receive the honor of our writing. I hold
there is a general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no
## p. 2486 (#46) ############################################
2486
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
deformity in any kind of species whatsoever: I cannot tell by
what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being
created in those outward shapes and figures which best express
those actions of their inward forms. And having passed that
general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was
good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity,
and is the rule of order and beauty: there is no deformity but
in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty,
nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts that they
become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To
speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or
misshapen but the chaos; wherein, notwithstanding, to speak
strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet
impregnate by the voice of God; now nature is not at variance
with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his
providence: art is the perfection of nature: were the world now
as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos; nature hath
made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are arti-
ficial; for nature is the art of God.
I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of
Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the
library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too
many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and
ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the
perished leaves of Solomon. I would not omit a copy of Enoch's
Pillars had they many nearer authors than Josephus, or did not
relish somewhat of the fable. Some men have written more than
others have spoken: Pineda quotes more authors in one work
than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great in-
ventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their
incommodities. It is not a melancholy utinam of my own, but
the desires of better heads, that there were a general synod; not
to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the bene-
fit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid
authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions
of rhapsodies begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker
judgments of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of
typographers.
Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and
spells are not witches, or, as we term them, magicians. I con-
## p. 2487 (#47) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2487
ceive there is a traditional magic not learned immediately from
the Devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having
once the secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practice
without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of
nature; where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will
under any master produce their effects. Thus, I think at first a
great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward
derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed
no more but the honest effects of nature: what invented by us
is philosophy, learned from him is magic. We do surely owe
the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad
angels. I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without
an asterisk or annotation: «Ascendens astrum multa revelat
quærentibus magnalia naturæ, i. e. , opera Dei. ” I do think that
many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the
courteous revelations of spirits, — for those noble essences in
heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth;
and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous
prognostics which forerun the ruins of States, princes, and pri-
vate persons are the charitable premonitions of good angels,
which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and
nature.
Now, besides these particular and divided spirits there may be
(for aught I know) an universal and common spirit to the whole
world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Her-
metical philosophers: if there be a common nature that unites ,
and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species,
why may there not be one that unites them all? However, I
am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet
makes no part of us: and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and
scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is the life
and radical heat of spirits and those essences that know not the
virtue of the sun; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell: this is
that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days
hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists
of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves
the region of the mind in serenity: whosoever feels not the
warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel
his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me
there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt
in the body of the sun.
## p. 2488 (#48) ############################################
2488
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
11
1
!
I believe that the whole frame of a beast doth perish, and is
left in the same state after death as before it was materialled
unto life: that the souls of men know neither contrary nor cor-
ruption; that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by
the privilege of their proper natures, and without a miracle; that
the souls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take possession of
heaven: that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are
not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils,
prompting and suggesting us into mischief, blood, and villainy;
instilling and stealing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are
not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs
of the world: but that those phantasms appear often, and do
frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because
those are the dormitories of the dead, where the Devil, like an
insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of
his victory in Adam.
This is that dismal conquest we all deplore, that makes us so
often cry, “Adam, quid fecisti ? " I thank God I have not those
strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on
life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death: not that
I am insensible of the dread and horror thereof; or by raking
into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomies,
skeletons, or cadaverous reliques, like vespilloes or grave-makers,
I am become stupid or have forgot the apprehension of mor-
tality; but that marshaling all the horrors, and contemplating the
extremities thereof, I find not anything therein able to daunt the
courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian; and there-
fore am not angry at the error of our first parents, or unwilling
to bear a part of this common fate, and like the best of them to
die - that is, to cease to breathe, to take a farewell of the ele- •
ments, to be a kind of nothing for a moment, to be within one.
instant of a spirit. When I take a full view and circle of myself
without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice,
Death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant: were
there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this
world should not entreat a moment's breath from me; could the
Devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I would not
"outlive that very thought. I have so abject a conceit of this
common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements,
I cannot think this to be a man, or to live according to the dig-
nity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience
1
## p. 2489 (#49) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2489
embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often defy
death: I honor any man that contemns it, nor can I highly love
any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a soldier,
and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will
die at the command of a sergeant. For a pagan there may be
some motives to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be
amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma
that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.
I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel
been able to effront or enharden me; yet I have one part of
modesty which I have seldom discovered in another, that is (to
speak truly) I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed
thereof: 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures that
in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, wife,
and children, stand afraid and start at us. The birds and beasts
of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting
all allegiance, begin to prey upon us. This very conceit hath in
a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed up in
the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied,
without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and
none had said, “Quantum mutatus ab illo! ” Not that I
ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for
playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life
for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might
not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any.
am
Men commonly set forth the torments of hell by fire and
the extremity of corporal afflictions, and describe hell in the same
method that Mahomet doth heaven. This indeed makes a noise,
and drums in popular ears: but if this be the terrible piece
thereof, it is not worthy to stand in diameter with heaven, whose
happiness consists in that part that is best able to comprehend
it -- that immortal essence, that translated divinity and colony of
God, the soul. Surely, though we place hell under earth, the
Devil's walk and purlieu is about it; men speak too popularly
who place it in those flaming mountains which to grosser appre-
hensions represent hell. The heart of man is the place the Devil'
dwells in: I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps
his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me. There are as .
many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds: there was more
## p. 2490 (#50) ############################################
2490
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
than one hell in Magdalen, when there were seven devils, for
every devil is an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture
in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to
afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or
introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but pity the merciful
intention of those hands that do destroy themselves ? the Devil,
were it in his power, would do the like; which being impossible,
his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute
wherein he is impassible, his immortality.
I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of
hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place; I have
so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot
the idea of hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one
than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a
perfect hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to complete our
afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin,
nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear God,
yet am not afraid of him; his mercies make me ashamed of my
sins, before his judgments afraid thereof; these are the forced •'
and secondary method of his wisdom, which he useth but as the
last remedy, and upon provocation: a course rather to deter the ·
wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship. I can hardly
think there was ever any scared into heaven; they go the fairest
way to heaven that would serve God without a hell; other mer-
cenaries, that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term
themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Al-
mighty.
That which is the cause of my election I hold to be the cause
of my salvation, which was the mercy and beneplacit of God,
before I was, or the foundation of the world. “Before Abraham
was, I am,” is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense,
if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but
Adam — that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod
held from all eternity: and in this sense, I say, the world was
before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning;
and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be
England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of
me before she conceived of Cain.
Now for that other virtue of charity, without which faith is a'
mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavored to ·
## p. 2491 (#51) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2491
nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I bor-
rowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and pre-
scribed laws of charity: and if I hold the true anatomy of
myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of
virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts
and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather
idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at
the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor
at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst
them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree
with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gath-
. ered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at
the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander: at the
sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a
stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common
antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repug-
nances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch: but where I find their
actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honor, love, and
embrace them in the same degree. I was born in the eighth
climate, but seem for to be framed and constellated unto all: I
am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden; all places, all
airs, make unto me one country; I am in England, everywhere,
and under any meridian; I have been shipwrecked, yet am not
enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play or sleep in a
tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience
would give me the lie if I should absolutely detest or hate any
essence but the Devil; or so at least abhor anything but that we
might come to composition. If there be any among those com-
mon objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that
great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion — the multitude: that
numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men.
and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together,
make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious .
than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools; it is
the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solo-
mon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe
Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the
base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even amongst
*the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with
• the same wheel as these; men in the same level with mechanics,
so.
## p. 2492 (#52) ############################################
2492
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and
their purses compound for their follies.
1
1
I must give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but
to fulfill and accomplish the will and command of my God: I
draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that
enjoined it; I believe no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries,
nor to content mine own commiserating disposition; for this is
still but moral charity, and an act that oweth more to passion
than reason. He that relieves another upon the bare suggestion
and bowels of pity doth not this so much for his sake as for
his own; for by compassion we make others' misery our own, and
so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also. It is as erro-
neous a conceit to redress other men's misfortunes upon the com-
mon considerations of merciful natures, that it may be one day
our own case; for this is a sinister and politic kind of charity,
whereby we seem to bespeak the pities of men in the like occas-
ions. And truly I have observed that those professed eleemosy-
naries, though in a crowd or multitude, do yet direct and place
their petitions on a few and selected persons: there is surely a
physiognomy which those experienced and master mendicants
observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and
will single out a face wherein they spy the signatures and marks
of mercy.
For there are mystically in our faces certain characters
which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that can-
not read A B C may read our natures. I hold moreover that
there is a phytognomy, or physiognomy, not only of men, but of
plants and vegetables; and in every one of them some outward
figures which hang as signs or bushes of their inward forms.
The finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his works,
not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms,
constitutions, parts and operations, which, aptly joined together,
do make one word that doth express their natures. By these
letters God calls the stars by their names; and by this alphabet
Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its nature.
Now there are, besides these characters in our faces, certain
mystical figures in our hands, which I dare not call mere dashes,
strokes à la volée, or at random, because delineated by a pencil
that never works in vain; and hereof I take more particular
notice, because I carry that in mine own hand which I could
never read of or discover in another. Aristotle, I confess, in his
## p. 2493 (#53) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2493
acute and singular book of physiognomy, hath made no mention
of chiromancy; yet I believe the Egyptians, who were nearer
addicted to those abstruse and mystical sciences, had a knowledge
therein, to which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did
after pretend, and perhaps retained a few corrupted principles
which sometimes might verify their prognostics.
It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many
millions of faces, there should be none alike. Now, contrary, I
wonder as much how there should be any: he that shall consider
how many thousand several words have been carelessly and with-
out study composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many
hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabric of one man, shall
easily find that this variety is necessary; and it will be very hard
that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another.
Let a painter carelessly limn out a million of faces, and you shall
find them all different; yea, let him have his copy before him, yet
after all his art there will remain a sensible distinction; for the
pattern or example of everything is the perfectest in that kind,
whereof we still come short, though we transcend or go beyond
it, because herein it is wide, and agrees not in all points unto
Nor doth the similitude of creatures disparage the
variety of nature, nor any way confound the works of God. For
even in things alike there is diversity; and those that do seem to
accord do manifestly disagree. And thus is man like God; for in
the same things that we resemble him we are utterly different
from him. There was never anything so like another as in all
points to concur; there will ever some reserved difference slip in,
to prevent the identity, without which two several things would
not be alike, but the same, which is impossible.
its copy.
Naturally amorous of all that is beautiful, I can look a whole
day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of
an horse. It is my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all
harmony; and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the
silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an
instrument: for there is music wherever there is harmony, order,
or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the
spheres; for those well-ordered motions and regular paces, though
they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they
strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically,
composed, delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust
## p. 2494 (#54) ############################################
}
5
2494
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church
music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my partic-
ular genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and tavern
music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me
a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First
Composer; there is something in it of divinity more than the ear
discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the
whole world and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as
the whole world, well understood, would afford the understand-
ing In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intel-
lectually sounds in the ears of God. It unties the ligaments of
my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by
degrees, methinks, resolves me into heaven.
I will not say,
with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its
nearest sympathy unto music; thus some, whose temper of body
agrees and humors the constitution of their souls, are born
poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.
There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that de-
lights us in our dreams than in our waked senses: without this,
I were unhappy; for my awaked judgment discontents me, ever
whispering unto me that I am from my friend; but my friendly
dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within
his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my
good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable
desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and
surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep
in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere
dreams to those of the next; as the phantasms of the night to
the conceits of the day. There is an equal delusion in both, and
the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other;
are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the
slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul.
It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our
waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At
my nativity my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I
was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor
disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one
dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, and
apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits
we
## p. 2495 (#55) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2495
thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then
fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time
also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories
have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings that
they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a
confused and broken tale of that that hath passed. Aristotle,
who hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not, methinks,
thoroughly defined it; nor yet Galen, though he seem to have
corrected it: for those noctambuloes and night-walkers, though
in their sleep do yet enjoy the action of their senses; we must
therefore say that there is something in us that is not in the
jurisdiction of Morpheus; and that those abstracted and ecstatic
souls do walk about in their own corps, as spirits with the bodies
they assume, wherein they seem to hear, see, and feel, though
indeed the organs are destitute of sense, and their natures of
those faculties that should inform them. Thus it is observed
that men sometimes, upon the hour of their departure, do speak
and reason above themselves. For then the soul, beginning to
be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like
herself, and to discourse in a strain above mortality.
FROM (CHRISTIAN MORALS)
WHEN
HEN thou lookest upon the imperfections of others, allow
one eye for what is laudable in them, and the balance
they have from some excellency, which may render them
considerable. While we look with fear or hatred upon the teeth
of the viper, we may behold his eye with love. In venomous
natures something may be amiable: poisons afford anti-poisons:
nothing is totally or altogether uselessly bad. Notable virtues
are sometimes dashed with notorious vices, and in some vicious
tempers have been found illustrious acts of virtue, which makes
such observable worth in some actions of King Demetrius, An-
tonius, and Ahab, as are not to be found in the same kind in
Aristides, Numa, or David. Constancy, generosity, clemency,
and liberality have been highly conspicuous in some persons not
marked out in other concerns for example or imitation. But
since goodness is exemplary in all, if others have not our vir-
tues, let us not be wanting in theirs; nor, scorning them for
their vices whereof we are free, be condemned by their virtues
## p. 2496 (#56) ############################################
2496
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
wherein we are deficient. There is dross, alloy, and embasement
in all human tempers; and he flieth without wings, who thinks
to find ophir or pure metal in any. For perfection is not, like
light, centred in any one body; but, like the dispersed seminal-
ities of vegetables at the creation, scattered through the whole
mass of the earth, no place producing all, and almost all some.
So that 'tis well if a perfect man can be made out of many
men, and to the perfect eye of God, even out of mankind.
Time, which perfects some things, imperfects also others. Could
we intimately apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in
the intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we might
more narrowly comprehend our present degeneration, and how
widely we are fallen from the pure exemplar and idea of our
nature: for after this corruptive elongation, from a primitive and
pure creation we are almost lost in degeneration; and Adam
hath not only fallen from his Creator, but we ourselves from
Adam, our Tycho and primary generator.
If generous honesty, valor, and plain dealing be the cog-
nizance of thy family or characteristic of thy country, hold fast
such inclinations sucked in with thy first breath, and which lay
in the cradle with thee.
Fall not into transforming degenera-
tions, which under the old name create a new nation. Be not
an alien in thine own nation; bring not Orontes into Tiber;
learn the virtues, not the vices, of thy foreign neighbors, and
make thy imitation by discretion, not contagion. Feel something
of thyself in the noble acts of thy ancestors, and find in thine
own genius that of thy predecessors. Rest not under the ex-
pired merits of others; shine by those of thine own.
Flame not,
like the central fire which enlighteneth no eyes, which no man
seeth, and most men think there is no such thing to be seen.
Add one ray unto the common lustre; add not only to the num-
ber, but the note of thy generation; and prove not a cloud, but
an asterisk in thy region.
Since thou hast an alarum in thy breast, which tells thee
thou hast a living spirit in thee above two thousand times in an
hour, dull not away thy days in slothful supinity and the tedious-
ness of doing nothing. To strenuous minds there is an inquiet-
ude in overquietness and no laboriousness in labor; and to
tread a mile after the slow pace of a snail, or the heavy meas-
ures of the lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring penance, and
worse than a race of some furlongs at the Olympics. The
## p. 2497 (#57) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2497
rapid courses of the heavenly bodies are rather imitable by our
thoughts than our corporeal motions; yet the solemn motions
of our lives amount unto a greater measure than is commonly
apprehended. Some few men have surrounded the globe of the
earth; yet many, in the set locomotions and movements of their
days, have measured the circuit of it, and twenty thousand miles
have been exceeded by them. Move circumspectly, not meticu-
lously, and rather carefully solicitous than anxiously solicitudi-
nous. Think not there is a lion in the way, nor walk with
leaden sandals in the paths of goodness; but in all virtuous
motions let prudence determine thy measures. Strive not to
run, like Hercules, a furlong in a breath: festination may prove
precipitation; deliberating delay may be wise cunctation, and
slowness no slothfulness.
Despise not the obliquities of younger ways, nor despair of
better things whereof there is yet no prospect. Who would
imagine that Diogenes, who in his younger days was a falsifier
of money, should, in the after course of his life, be so great a
contemner of metal? Some negroes, who believe the resurrection,
think that they shall rise white. Even in this life regeneration
may imitate resurrection; our black and vicious tinctures may
wear off, and goodness clothe us with candor, Good admoni-
tions knock not always in vain. There will be signal examples
of God's mercy, and the angels must not want their charitable
rejoices for the conversion of lost sinners. Figures of most
angles do nearest approach unto circles, which have no angles at
all. Some may be near unto goodness who are conceived far
from it; and many things happen not likely to ensue from any
promises of antecedencies. Culpable beginnings have found com-
mendable conclusions, and infamous courses pious retractations.
Detestable sinners have proved exemplary converts on earth, and
may be glorious in the apartment of Mary Magdalen in heaven.
Men are not the same through all divisions of their ages: time,
experience, self-reflections, and God's mercies, make in some
well-tempered minds a kind of translation before death, and men
to differ from themselves as well as from other persons. Hereof
the old world afforded many examples to the infamy of latter
ages, wherein men too often live by the rule of their inclina-
tions; so that, without any astral prediction, the first day gives
the last: men are commonly as they were; or rather, as bad
V-157
## p. 2498 (#58) ############################################
2498
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
|
1
1
dispositions run into worser habits, the evening doth not crown,
but sourly conclude, the day.
If the Almighty will not spare us according to his merciful
capitulation at Sodom; if his goodness please not to pass over a
great deal of bad for a small pittance of good, or to look upon
us in the lump, there is slender hope for mercy, or sound pre-
sumption of fulfilling half his will, either in persons or nations:
they who excel in some virtues being so often defective in
others; few men driving at the extent and amplitude of good-
ness, but computing themselves by their best parts, and others
by their worst, are content to rest in those virtues which others
commonly want. Which makes this speckled face of honesty in
the world; and which was the imperfection of the old philoso-
phers and great pretenders unto virtue; who, well declining the
gaping vices of intemperance, incontinency, violence, and oppres-
sion, were yet blindly peccant in iniquities of closer faces; were
envious, malicious, contemners, scoffers, censurers, and stuffed
with vizard vices, no less depraving the ethereal particle and
diviner portion of man. For envy, malice, hatred, are the qual-
ities of Satan, close and dark like himself; and where such
brands smoke, the soul cannot be white. Vice may be had at
all prices; expensive and costly iniquities, which make the noise,
cannot be every man's sins; but the soul may be foully inqui-
nated at a very low rate, and a man may be cheaply vicious to
the perdition of himself.
Having been long tossed in the ocean of the world, he will
by that time feel the in-draught of another, unto which this
seems but preparatory and without it of no high value. He will
experimentally find the emptiness of all things, and the noth-
ing of what is past; and wisely grounding upon true Christian
expectations, finding so much past, will wholly fix upon what is
to come. He will long for perpetuity, and live as though he .
made haste to be happy. The last may prove the prime part of
his life, and those his best days which he lived nearest heaven.
Live happy in the Elysium of a virtuously composed mind,
and let intellectual contents exceed the delights wherein mere
pleasurists place their paradise. Bear not too slack reins upon
pleasure, nor let complexion or contagion betray thee unto the
exorbitancy of delight. Make pleasure thy recreation or inter-
missive relaxation, not thy Diana, life, and profession. Volup-
tuousness is as insatiable as covetousness. Tranquillity is better
1
1
## p. 2499 (#59) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2499
we
a
race
than jollity, and to appease pain than to invent pleasure. Our
hard entrance into the world, our miserable going out of it, our
sicknesses, disturbances, and sad rencounters in it, do clamor-
ously tell us came not into the world to run
of
delight, but to perform the sober acts and serious purposes of
man; which to omit were foully to miscarry in the advantage
of humanity, to play away an uniterable life, and to have lived
in vain. Forget not the capital end, and frustrate not the oppor-
tunity of once living. Dream not of any kind of metempsychosis
or transanimation, but into thine own body, and that after a
long time; and then also unto wail or bliss, according to thy first
and fundamental life. Upon a curricle in this world depends a
long course of the next, and upon a narrow scene here an end-
less expansion hereafter. In vain some think to have an end of
their beings with their lives. Things cannot get out of their
natures, or be, or not be, in despite of their constitutions. .
Rational existences in heaven perish not at all, and but partially
on earth; that which is thus once, will in some way be always;
the first living human soul is still alive, and all Adam hath
found no period.
Since the stars of heaven do differ in glory; since it hath ·
pleased the Almighty hand to honor the north pole with lights
above the south; since there are some stars so bright that they
can hardly be looked upon, some so dim that they can scarcely
be seen, and vast numbers not to be seen at all even by arti-
ficial eyes; read thou the earth in heaven and things below
from above. Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of
things, and expect not equality in lustre, dignity, or perfection,
in regions or persons below; where numerous numbers must
be content to stand like lacteous or nebulous stars, little taken
notice of, or dim in their generations. All which may be con-
tentedly allowable in the affairs and ends of this world, and in
suspension unto what will be in the order of things hereafter,
and the new system of mankind which will be in the world to
come; when the last may be the first, and the first the last;
when Lazarus may sit above Cæsar, and the just, obscure on
earth, shall shine like the sun in heaven; when personations shall
cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall
rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever.
## p. 2500 (#60) ############################################
2500
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
FROM HYDRIOTAPHIA, OR URN-BURIAL)
IN
1
THE Jewish Hypogæum and subterranean cell at Rome was
little observable beside the variety of lamps and frequent
draughts of the holy candlestick. In authentic draughts of
Antony and Jerome, we meet with thigh bones and death's-
heads; but the cemeterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs
were filled with draughts of Scripture stories; not declining the
flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures
of peacocks, doves, and cocks; but iterately affecting the por-
traits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as
hopeful draughts and hinting imagery of the resurrection -- which
is the life of the grave and sweetens our habitations in the land
of moles and pismires.
The particulars of future beings must needs be dark unto
ancient theories, which Christian philosophy yet determines but
in a cloud of opinions. A dialogue between two infants in the
womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely
illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet
discourse in Plato's den, and are but embryon philosophers.
Pythagoras escapes, in the fabulous hell of Dante, among
that swarm of philosophers, wherein, whilst we meet with Plato
and Socrates, Cato is to be found in no lower place than Pur-
gatory. Among all the set, Epicurus is most considerable,
whom men make honest without an Elysium, who contemned
life without encouragement of immortality, and making nothing
after death, yet made nothing of the king of terrors.
Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended
as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto
such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to
die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be
nothing and return into their chaos again. Certainly, such spirits
as could contemn death, when they expected no better being
after, would have scorned to live had they known any. And'
therefore we applaud not the judgments of Machiavel that
Christianity makes men cowards, or that with the confidence of
but half dying, the despised virtues of patience and humility
have abased the spirits of men, which pagan principles exalted;
but rather regulated the wildness of audacities, in the attempts,
grounds, and eternal sequels of death, wherein men of the boldest
## p. 2501 (#61) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2501
we
exten-
spirits are often prodigiously temerarious. Nor can
uate the valor of ancient martyrs, who contemned death in the
uncomfortable scene of their lives, and in their decrepit martyr-
doms did probably lose not many months of their days, or parted
with life when it was scarce worth the living; for (beside that
long time past holds no consideration unto a slender time to
come) they had no small disadvantage from the constitution of
old age, which naturally makes men fearful, and complexionally
superannuated from the bold and courageous thoughts of youth
and fervent years. But the contempt of death from corporal
animosity promoteth not our felicity.
our felicity. They may sit in the
orchestra and noblest seats of heaven who have held up shaking
hands in the fire, and humanly contended for glory.
Meanwhile, Epicurus lies deep in Dante's hell, wherein we
meet with tombs inclosing souls which denied their immortal-
ities. But whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than
he spake, or, erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above
philosophers of more specious maxims, lie so deep as he is
placed; at least so low as not to rise against Christians who,
believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their
practice and conversation -
were a query too sad to insist on.
But all or most apprehensions rested in opinions of some
future being, which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those
perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which Christians pity
or laugh at. Happy are they which live not in that disadvantage
of time, when men could say little for futurity but from reason;
whereby the noblest minds fell often upon doubtful deaths and
melancholy dissolutions. With those hopes Socrates warmed his
doubtful spirits against that cold potion; and Cato, before he
durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading the
immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto
the animosity of that attempt.
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man,
to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is
no farther state to come, unto which this seems progressional,
and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the
natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy
in nature. Unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justice
of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen
lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper igno-
rance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of
## p. 2502 (#62) ############################################
2502
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
1
inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions,
as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures;
and being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or
cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated
their contentment. But the superior ingredient and obscured part
of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting con-
tentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than our
present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their
own accomplishments.
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and
deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of
perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids ?
Erostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana; he is almost
lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's
horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felici-
ties by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal
durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.
Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there
be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand re-
membered in the known account of time? Without the favor of
the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as
the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content
to be as though they had not been; to be found in the register
of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up
the first story, and the recorded names ever since contain not one
living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that
shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day; and who
knows when was the equinox ? Every hour adds unto that cur-
rent arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. And since •
death must be the Lucina of life, and even pagans could doubt
whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at
right declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it ·
cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our
light in ashes;* since the brother of death daily haunts us with
dying mementos, and time, that grows old itself, bids us hope no
long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.
Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
shares with memory a great part even of our living beings. We
* According to the custom of the Jews, who placed a lighted wax candle
in a pot of ashes by the corpse.
1
1
1
1
## p. 2503 (#63) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2503
slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of afflic-
tion leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extrem-
ities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones
are fables.
Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery,
or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy
stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils
past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the
mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered senses not
relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept
raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity con-
tented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their
souls; a good way to continue their memories, while, having the
advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something
remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of
their passed selves, making accumulation of glory unto their last
durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night
of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and
make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no
more than to return into their unknown and divine original again.
Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies
in sweet consistencies to attend the return of their souls. But all
was vanity, feeding the wind and folly. The Egyptian mummies,
which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth.
Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and
Pharaoh is sold for balsams.
There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever
hath no beginning may be confident of no end, which is the
peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself, and
the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted,
as not to suffer even from the power of itself. All others have
a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction. But
the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly
glory, and the quality of either state after death makes a folly of
posthumous memory. God, who can only destroy our souls, and
hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath
directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of
chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustra-
tion; and to hold long subsistence seems but a scape in oblivion.
But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in •
the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor
omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.
## p. 2504 (#64) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2 504
us.
1
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within
A small fire sufficeth for life; great flames seemed too little
after death, while men vainly affected pyres, and to burn like
Sardanapalus. But the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly
of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires into the rule of
sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide
wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.
While some have studied monuments, others have studiously
declined them; and some have been so vainly boisterous, that
they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein Alaricus seems
more subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at the
bottom. Even Sylla, who thought himself safe in his urn, could
not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his monu-
ment. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal
so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them
in the next; who when they die make no commotion among the
dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.
Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of
vainglory and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the
most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion,
which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition,
humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity unto which all others
must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of
contingency.
Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity,
made little more of this world than the world that was before it,
while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination and night
of their forebeings. And if any have been so happy as truly to
understand Christian annihilation, ecstasis, exolution, liquefac-
tion, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God,
and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had a
handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely
over, and the earth in ashes unto them.
1
1
1
1
1
## p. 2505 (#65) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2505
FROM CA FRAGMENT ON MUMMIES).
ISE Egypt, prodigal of her embalmments, wrapped up her
princes and great commanders in aromatical folds, and,
studiously extracting from corruptible bodies their cor-
ruption, ambitiously looked forward to immortality; from which
vainglory we have become acquainted with many remnants of
the old world, who could discourse unto us of the great things
of yore, and tell us strange tales of the sons of Mizraim and
ancient braveries of Egypt. Wonderful indeed are the preserves
of time, which openeth unto us mummies from crypts and pyra-
mids, and mammoth bones from caverns and excavations; whereof
man hath found the best preservation, appearing unto us in some
sort fleshly, while beasts must be fain of an osseous continuance.
In what original this practice of the Egyptians had root,
divers authors dispute; while some place the origin hereof in the
desire to prevent the separation of the soul by keeping the body
untabified, and alluring the spiritual part to remain by sweet and
precious odors. But all this was but fond inconsideration. The
soul, having broken its
is not stayed by bands and
cerecloths, nor to be recalled by Sabæan odors, but fleeth to the
place of invisibles, the ubi of spirits, and needeth a surer than
Hermes's seal to imprison it to its medicated trunk, which yet
subsists anomalously in its indestructible case, and, like a widow
looking for her husband, anxiously awaits its return.
That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly deliver-
eth, and divers confirms; but of the particular uses thereof, there
is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes
the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use
thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic,
and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood.
Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First of France, who
always carried mummies with him as a panacea against all dis-
orders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out,
scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding
the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes unto un-
worthy potions. Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirur-
geons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammitticus be weighed
unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in
electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely,
such diet is dismal vampirism, and exceeds in horror the black
## p. 2506 (#66) ############################################
2506
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled except in those Ara-
bian feasts, wherein Ghoules feed horribly.
But the common opinion of the virtues of mummy bred great
consumption thereof, and princes and great men contended for
this strange panacea, wherein Jews dealt largely, manufacturing
mummies from dead carcasses and giving them the names of
kings, while specifics were compounded from crosses and gibbet
leavings. There wanted not a set of Arabians who counterfeited
mummies so accurately that it needed great skill to distinguish
the false from the true. Queasy stomachs would hardly fancy
the doubtful potion, wherein one might so easily swallow a cloud
for his Juno, and defraud the fowls of the air while in conceit
enjoying the conserves of Canopus.
For those dark caves and mummy repositories are Satan's
abodes, wherein he speculates and rejoices on human vainglory,
and keeps those kings and conquerors, whom alive he bewitched,
whole for that great day when he will claim his own, and
marshal the kings of Nilus and Thebes in sad procession unto
the pit.
Death, that fatal necessity which so many would overlook or
blinkingly survey, the old Egyptians held continually before their
eyes. Their embalmed ancestors they carried about at their ban-
quets, as holding them still a part of their families, and not
thrusting them from their places at feasts, They wanted not
likewise a sad preacher at their tables to admonish them daily of
death, --surely an unnecessary discourse while they banqueted in
sepulchres. Whether this were not making too much of death,
as tending to assuefaction, some reason there is to doubt; but
certain it is that such practices would hardly be embraced by
our modern gourmands, who like not to look on faces of mortua,
or be elbowed by mummies.
Yet in those huge structures and pyramidal immensities, of
the builders whereof so little is known, they seemed not so much
to raise sepulchres or temples to death as to contemn and dis-
dain it, astonishing heaven with their audacities, and looking
forward with delight to their interment in those eternal piles.
Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of
them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres
of the dead, and, planting thereon lasting bases, defied the crum-
bling touches of time and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet
all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things,
1
## p. 2507 (#67) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2507
and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh
unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth
semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puz-
zles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams.
History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveler, as he paceth
amazedly through those deserts, asketh of her, Who builded them?
and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.
Egypt itself is now become the land of obliviousness, and
doteth. Her ancient civility is gone, and her glory hath van-
ished as a phantasma. Her youthful days are over, and her
face hath become wrinkled and tetric. She poreth not upon the
heavens; astronomy is dead unto her, and knowledge maketh
other cycles. Canopus is afar off, Memnon resoundeth not to the
sun, and Nilus heareth strange voices. Her monuments are but
hieroglyphically sempiternal. Osiris and Anubis, her averruncous
deities, have departed, while Orus yet remains dimly shadowing
the principle of vicissitude and the effluxion of things, but re-
ceiveth little oblation.
FROM A LETTER TO A FRIEND)
HE
E WAS willing to quit the world alone and altogether, leaving
no earnest behind him for corruption or after-grave, having
small content in that common satisfaction to survive or
live in another, but amply satisfied that his disease should die
with himself, nor revive in a posterity to puzzle physic, and
make sad mementos of their parent hereditary.
In this deliberate and creeping progress unto the grave, he
was somewhat too young and of too noble a mind to fall upon
that stupid symptom observable in divers persons near their
journey's end, and which may be reckoned among the mortal
symptoms of their last disease; that is, to become more narrow-
minded, miserable, and tenacious, unready to part with anything
when they are ready to part with all, and afraid to want
when they have no time to spend; meanwhile physicians, who
know that many are mad but in a single depraved imagination,
and one prevalent decipiency, and that beside and out of such
single deliriums a man may meet with sober actions and good
sense in Bedlam, cannot but smile to see the heirs and concerned
relations gratulating themselves on the sober departure of their
## p. 2508 (#68) ############################################
2508
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
friends; and though they behold such mad covetous passages, con-
tent to think they die in good understanding, and in their sober
senses.
Avarice, which is not only infidelity but idolatry, either from
covetous progeny or questuary education, had no root in his
breast, who made good works the expression of his faith, and
was big with desires unto public and lasting charities; and surely,
where good wishes and charitable intentions exceed abilities, the-
orical beneficency may be more than a dream. They build not
castles in the air who would build churches on earth; and though
they leave no such structures here, may lay good foundations
in heaven. In brief, his life and death were such that I could
not blame them who wished the like, and almost to have been
himself: almost, I say; for though we may wish the prosperous
appurtenances of others, or to be another in his happy accidents,
yet so intrinsical is every man unto himself that some doubt
may be made whether any would exchange his being, or sub-
stantially become another man.
He had wisely seen the world at home and abroad, and
thereby observed under what variety men are deluded in the
pursuit of that which is not here to be found. And although he
had no opinion of reputed felicities below, and apprehended men
widely out in the estimate of such happiness, yet his sober con-
tempt of the world wrought no Democritism or Cynicism, no
laughing or snarling at it, as well understanding there are not
felicities in this world to satisfy a serious mind; and therefore,
to soften the stream of our lives, we are fain to take in the re-
puted contentions of this world, to unite with the crowd in their
beatitudes, and to make ourselves happy by consortion, opinion,
or co-existimation: for strictly to separate from received and
customary felicities, and to confine unto the rigor of realities,
were to contract the consolation of our beings unto too uncom-
fortable circumscriptions.
Not to be content with life is the unsatisfactory state of those
who destroy themselves; who, being afraid to live, run blindly
upon their own death, which no man fears by experience: and
the Stoics had a notable doctrine to take away the fear thereof;
that is, in such extremities, to desire that which is not to be
avoided, and wish what might be feared; and so made evils vol.
untary and to suit with their own desires, which took off the
terror of them.
1
## p. 2509 (#69) ############################################
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2509
But the ancient martyrs were not encouraged by such falla-
cies, who, though they feared not death, were afraid to be their
own executioners; and therefore thought it more wisdom to
crucify their lusts than their bodies, to circumcise than stab their
hearts, and to mortify than kill themselves.
His willingness to leave this world about that age when most
men think they may best enjoy it, though paradoxical unto
worldly ears, was not strange unto mine, who have so often
observed that many, though old, oft stick fast unto the world,
and seem to be drawn like Cacus's oxen, backward with great
struggling and reluctancy unto the grave. The long habit of
living makes mere men more hardly to part with life, and all to
be nothing, but what is to come. To live at the rate of the old
world, when some could scarce remember themselves young, may
afford no better digested death than a more moderate period.
Many would have thought it an happiness to have had their lot
of life in some notable conjunctures of ages past; but the uncer-
tainty of future times hath tempted few to make a part in ages
to come. And surely, he that hath taken the true altitude of
things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this age, is
not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less
three or four hundred years hence, when no man can comfort-
ably imagine what face this world will carry; and therefore, since
every age makes a step unto the end of all things, and the Script-
ure affords so hard a character of the last times, quiet minds
will be content with their generations, and rather bless ages past
than be ambitious of those to come.
Though age had set no seal upon his face, yet a dim eye
might clearly discover fifty in his actions; and therefore, since
wisdom is the gray hair, and an unspotted life old age, although
his years came short, he might have been said to have held up
with longer livers, and to have been Solomon's old man. And
surely if we deduct all those days of our life which we might
wish unlived, and which abate the comfort of those we now live,
if we reckon up only those days which God hath accepted of
our lives, a life of good years will hardly be a span long; the
son in this sense may outlive the father, and none be climac-
terically old. He that early arriveth unto the parts and prudence
of age is happily old without the uncomfortable attendants of it;
and 'tis superfluous to live unto gray hairs, when in a precocious
temper we anticipate the virtues of them. In brief, he cannot
## p. 2510 (#70) ############################################
2510
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
be accounted young who outliveth the old man. He that hath
early arrived unto the measure of a perfect stature in Christ,
hath already fulfilled the prime and longest intention of his
being; and one day lived after the perfect rule of piety is to be
preferred before sinning immortality.
Although he attained not unto the years of his predecessors,
yet he wanted not those preserving virtues which confirm the
thread of weaker constitutions. Cautelous chastity and crafty
sobriety were far from him; those jewels were paragon, without
flaw, hair, ice, or cloud in him: which affords me a hint to pro-
ceed in these good wishes and few mementos unto you.
SOME RELATIONS WHOSE TRUTH WE FEAR
From (Pseudoxia Epidemica'
M*
1
ANY other accounts like these we meet sometimes in history,
scandalous unto Christianity, and even unto humanity;
whose verities not only, but whose relations, honest minds
do deprecate. For of sins heteroclital, and such as want either
name or precedent, there is ofttimes a sin even in their histories.
We desire no records of such enormities; sins should be accounted
new, that so they may be esteemed monstrous. They amit of
monstrosity as they fall from their rarity; for men count it
venial to err with their forefathers, and foolishly conceive they
divide a sin in its society. The pens of men may sufficiently
expatiate without these singularities of villainy; for as they
increase the hatred of vice in some, so do they enlarge the
theory of wickedness in all. And this is one thing that may
make latter ages worse than were the former; for the vicious
examples of ages past poison the curiosity of these present,
affording a hint of sin unto seducible spirits, and soliciting those
unto the imitation of them, whose heads were
so per-
versely principled as to invent them. In this kind we commend
the wisdom and goodness of Galen, who would not leave unto
the world too subtle a theory of poisons; unarming thereby the
malice of venomous spirits, whose ignorance must be contented
with sublimate and arsenic.
For surely there are subtler ven-
erations, such as will invisibly destroy, and like the basilisks of
heaven. In things of this nature silence commendeth history:
'tis the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must never
rise a Pancirollus, nor remain any register but that of hell
never
1
1
1
## p. 2511 (#71) ############################################
2511
WILLIAM BROWNE
(1591-1643)
MONG the English poets famous for their imaginative interpre-
tation of nature, high rank must be given to William
Browne, who belongs in the list headed by Spenser, and
including Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton, George
Wither, and Phineas Fletcher. Although he shows skill and charm
of style in various kinds of verse, his name rests chiefly upon his
largest work, Britannia's Pastorals. This is much wider in
scope
than the title suggests, if one follows the definition given by Pope in
his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. ' He says:— “A Pastoral is an
imitation of the action of a shepherd or one considered under that
character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or , narrated, or
mixed of both; the fable simple, the manners not too polite nor too
rustic; the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and pas-
sion.
If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this
Idea along with us: that Pastoral is an image of what they call the
Golden Age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shep-
herds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to
have been when the best of men followed the employment.
We must therefore use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful,
and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life,
and in concealing its miseries.
