CHAPTER XIV

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

THE style of Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1682, differs from that of the great Elizabethans who preceded him.

While altogether free from the fantastic affectations of the Euphuists, his prose displays a deliberate ingenuity of phrase that removes it from the broad simplicity of his greatest predecessors.

He commands an immense vocabulary, and, not satisfied with the simplicity of diction of his forerunners, framed his sentences with precious and dexterous art.

His Urn Burial is justly celebrated as a wonderful example of this kind of English. It is solemn and splendid, and sometimes obscure. The fifth chapter, after speaking of the dead whose bones have "quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests," contains the following characteristic passage:

"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, 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 contented 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, make 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."

This language calls upon us for some alert mental attention for its proper apprehension and in fact must be read with the eye at a leisured pace. Read aloud to an audience, much of its meaning would escape recognition. This seems to me to exclude it from taking its place with the greatest prose, which does not wrap thought in a veil of words so intricate as to hide it from the mind of an ordinary intelligent listener.

More simple and entirely admirable is his discourse on the acerbities of controversy:

"I cannot fall out or contemn a man for an error, or conceive why a difference of opinion should divide affection; for controversies, disputes, and argumentations, both in philosophy and in divinity, if they meet with discreet and peaceable natures, do not infringe the laws of charity.

"In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose; for then reason, like a bad hound, spends upon a false scent, and forsakes the question first started.

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And this is one reason why controversies are never determined; for though they are amply proposed, they are scarce at all handled; they do so swell with unnecessary digressions, and the parenthesis is often as large as the main discourse upon the subject."

As far as my memory and reading travels, Sir Thomas Browne is the only considerable man of letters I have encountered who found nothing to regret in the burning of the great library at Alexandria. In his Religio Medici he says:

"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 part I think there be too many in the world.”

But in defence of him, we may all admit that we could spare three-quarters of most great libraries so we could preserve for ever the masterpieces they contain.

But Sappho was lost to the world when the Alexandria library was destroyed. He must have forgotten that!

CHAPTER XV

JEREMY TAYLOR

COLERIDGE was of opinion that Jeremy Taylor was the most eloquent of all divines, and Coleridge was no mean critic.

The writings of Jeremy Taylor,” he writes, are a perpetual feast to me." And certainly they are full of visionary beauty.

Lovely similes and metaphors flow from his pen and decorate almost every page, and it matters not to him whether the digression be relevant to the matter in hand so it be desirable in itself.

As an instance of this opulent habit of poetical parenthesis, the following sudden passage on the sun may be quoted :

"For thus the sun is the eye of the world; and he is indifferent to the negro or the cold Russian, to them that dwell under the line, and them that stand near the tropics, the scalded Indian, or the poor boy that shakes at the foot of the Riphean Hills; but the flexures of the heaven and the earth, the conveniency of abode, and the approaches to the north or south, respectively change the emanations of his beams; not that they do not pass always from him, but that they are not equally received below, but by periods and changes, by little inlets and reflections; they receive what they can, and some have only a dark day and a long night from him; snows and white cattle, a miserable life, and a perpetual harvest of catarrhs and consumptions, apoplexies and dead palsies; but some have splendid fires and aromatic spices, rich wines and well-digested fruits, great wit and great courage, because they dwell in his eye,

and look in his face, and are the courtiers of the sun, and wait upon him in his chambers of the east.'

Very much does Jeremy Taylor love to take his metaphors from the beauties of nature and the world about him. Here is another instance:

"It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person and it is visible to us who are alive.

Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth and the fair cheeks and the full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three-days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange.

But so I have seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of his hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a rude breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of sickly age; it bowed its head, and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces."

In his Holy Dying there are many passages of splendid and solemn sadness enforcing the transitoriness of all human grandeur and contrasting the swift passage of the longest life with the unending silence of the tomb :

"A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter the sepulchres of kings.

"In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war and peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more: and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the

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