Browne, SIR THOMAS, author of the Religio Medici, was born in London, October 19, 1605, the son of a mercer of good family at Upton in Cheshire. His father died early, and his mother married again, leaving her son to the care of a rapacious guardian who seems to have made inroads upon his ward's fortune of £6000. He was educated at Winchester College and at Broadgate Hall (now
Pembroke College), Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1626 and M.A. in 1629. He next studied medicine, travelled in Ireland, France, and Italy, continued his medical studies at Montpellier and Padua, graduated as Doctor of Medicine at Leyden about 1633, and at Oxford in 1637, settling the same year at Norwich. He lived calmly throughout the troubles of the Civil War; maintained an active correspondence with some of the most learned antiquaries and scientists of his time, as Evelyn, Dugdale, Elias Ashmole, and Ray the naturalist; and was knighted by Charles II. on his visit to Norwich in 1671. He had married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and his domestic letters that have been preserved give glimpses of a home-life of singular happiness. Of his twelve children, but one son and three daughters survived him. He died on the day on which he had completed his seventy-seventh year, 19th October 1682, and was buried in the church of St Peter's Mancroft, where his coffin was accidentally discovered by some workmen in 1840. The skull, which was well preserved, was 'knaw'd out of its grave' and placed in the hospital-museum—a 'tragical abomination' that the men of Norwich might well have spared their greatest citizen.
Sir Thomas Browne's greatest work is his earliest, the Religio Medici, written about 1635 at Shipden Hall near Halifax, after his return from his travels, when his life was still a 'miracle of thirty years.' He tells us in the preface that it was composed 'at leisurable hours' for his 'private exercise and satisfaction,' and that 'the intention was not publick.' Two surreptitious editions published in 1642 obliged the author to issue an authorised edition in 1643. The book did not need Sir Kenelm Digby's 'observations' to make it at once famous if not popular. It was translated into Latin, and had the honour to be inserted in the Index Expurgatorius. Certain passages gave rise to much undeserved misrepresentation of its author's religious opinions, although, as Dr Johnson says, 'it is no difficult task to replace him among the most zealous professors of Christianity.' The book indeed is a kind of confession of faith, though it is more of a contribution to piety than to faith. It is the spiritual self-revelation of a nature of rare beauty and attractiveness, and the sympathetic reader is startled by occasional passages that reveal a depth of insight into the dim mysteries of the spiritual life that seems as unconscious as it is unexpected. 'Wingy mysteries in divinity and airy subtleties in religion' had ever a strange charm for the speculative side of Browne's intellect. He loves to abandon his mind to a full sense of the mysterious in religion. 'There are not impossibilities enough,' he says, 'in religion for an active faith. . . . I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!' The book, moreover, reveals a lofty toleration for conditions of life and opinion widely different from the author's own, and a rare width of spiritual sympathy, extending even to virtuous heathens and to those ceremonies which 'misguided zeal terms superstition.' It is startling to find such a sentence as the following in a seventeenth-century writer: 'Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion. It hath been the unhappy method of angry devotion.' Unfortunately, the clear-sighted thinker was not in all points before his time. He makes avowal here of his belief in the existence of witches, and a pitiful commentary on this was his opinion given at the request of the Lord Chief-justice, Sir Matthew Hale, during the trial of two women for witchcraft at Bury St Edmunds in 1664, which doubtless helped to send the unhappy victims to their doom.
Sir Thomas Browne's next work was Pseudo- doxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors (1646), a strange amalgam of humour, acuteness, and credulity. This is by far the largest and most elaborate of his works, yet even it is entirely discursive and occasional. It contains the most remarkable out-of-the-way learning, lightened up by grave humour; here and there a really acute scientific remark alternating with a laboured and serious discussion of such old popular opinions about natural objects as have long since passed into absurdities.
In 1658 appeared Hydriotaphia; Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk; and The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial Lozenge, net-work plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered. The former is mainly an elaborate discussion of the burial-customs in various countries at various times, showing all the author's vast and curious learning set in language of such rich and gorgeous eloquence that its splendid roll is not surpassed by the very loftiest passages in Jeremy Taylor or Milton. The echoes of the sombre and sonorous eloquence of its concluding chapter—a solemn homily on death and immortality—will never die away from the ear of a reader with any sense for the finest cadences of majestic and impassioned English.
The Garden of Cyrus is the most fantastic of Browne's writings. Its aim is to show that the number five pervaded not only all the horticulture of antiquity, but that it recurs throughout all plant-life, as well as the 'figurations' of animals. From the date of the above (1658) Sir Thomas Browne published nothing, but after his death appeared (1683) a collection of Miscellany Tracts under the editorship of Archbishop Tenison. These were reprinted in the folio edition of his works published in 1686. The Letter to a Friend upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend first appeared in 1690. Not a few passages in this work were worthy of the master's hand. In 1712 appeared Posthumous Works of the learned Sir Thomas Browne, containing some new papers, together with a reprint of the Letter to a Friend. The Christian Morals, an incomplete work, evidently intended to have been a continuation of the Religio Medici, was first published in 1716 by Archdeacon Jeffery.
Sir Thomas Browne's works are unsystematic and unequal—there is an unpremeditated desultoriness throughout that strikes an observant reader. His thought, no less than his style, is strikingly original, marked by high and occasionally transcendent intellectual power, often expressed with quaint humour or searching pathos, and always carrying with it a strange impressiveness. His favourite theme throughout all his books is ever the mystery of death and what lies beyond the grave, and the visible signs of mortality mean as much to him as they did to Shakespeare himself as a text from which to descant on what transcends the little sphere of human life. His style is too peculiar, idiomatic, and indeed difficult, ever to be generally popular, and it must be admitted that his studious brevity often falls pitifully into obscurity. In his own words, 'the quality of the subject will sometimes carry us into expressions beyond mere English apprehensions;' and indeed no writer has equalled him in the free coinage of Latinisms. Our language was then in a transition stage as a medium for expressing high thinking in prose, and some extenuation for his long and sonorous Latinisms may be found in the difficulty of finding at that period, alike in sound and sense, adequate English words for ideas so remote and extraordinary. It may be well for our language that such words as manuduction, supputation, assuefaction, magnalities, omniety, opinionatry, and resipiscency have never passed into general usage; but at least it cannot be denied that in Sir Thomas Browne's pages even these are rhetorically in perfect harmony with the thought, and help to give his rhythm that roll which resembles nothing so much as the sound of the distant sea breaking in long billows on the shore. Browne's influence on English literature has been deep, if not wide in extent. No writer bears the impress of his influence more strongly marked, alike in style and cast of thought, than Charles Lamb, who indeed boasts that he was the first 'among the moderns' to discover his excellencies. De Quincey ranks Sir Thomas Browne with Jeremy Taylor as the richest and most dazzling of rhetoricians, and Mr Lowell calls him 'our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare;' perhaps it is truer to say that his supremest merit rests in his being the highest type of the profound humorist, to whom 'all existence had been but food for contemplation.'
The only complete collection of Sir Thomas Browne's works is the monumental edition of Simon Wilkin (4 vols. Pickering, 1835-36), the labour of twelve years. Dr Greenhill's scholarly edition of the Religio Medici appeared in 1881. The best Life is still that by Dr Johnson, with Wilkin's 'Supplementary Memoir.'