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to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further 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 the justice of their constitution, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower, whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of 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 things, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment. But the superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, 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."

To his treatise on Urnburial was added the Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincunxial Lozenge, or Network Plantation of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered. This discourse he begins with the Sacred Garden, in which the first man was placed; and deduces the practice of horticulture from the earliest accounts of antiquity to the time of the Persian Cyrus, the first man whom we actually know to have planted a Quincunx; which, however, our author is inclined to believe of longer date, and not only discovers it in the description of the hanging gardens of Babylon, but seems willing to believe, and to persuade his reader, that it was practised by the feeders on vegetables before the flood.

Some of the most pleasing performances have been produced by learning and genius exercised upon subjects of little importance. It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to show how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inadequately of things really and naturally great, is a task not only difficult but disagreeable; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes by standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder to which nature had contributed little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the

Mystically Considered.] He withstood the Copernican hypothesis— on precisely the same ground on which some modern naturalists are disposed to regard, with apprehension and distrust, the Cuvierian System of Geology-as opposing the statements of Scripture.

Frogs of Homer, the Gnat and the Bees of Virgil, the Butterfly of Spenser, the Shadow of Wowerus, and the Quincunx of Browne.

In the prosecution of this sport of fancy, he considers every production of art and nature, in which he could find any decussation or approaches to the form of a Quincunx; and as a man once resolved upon ideal discoveries, seldom searches long in vain, he finds his favourite figure in almost every thing, whether natural or invented, ancient or modern, rude or artificial, sacred and civil; so that a reader, not watchful against the power of his infusions, would imagine that decussation was the great business of the world, and that nature and art had no other purpose than to exemplify and imitate a Quincunx.

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To show the excellence of this figure, he enumerates all its properties; and finds in it almost every thing of use or pleasure and to show how readily he supplies what he cannot find, one instance may be sufficient; "though therein (says he) we meet not with right angles, yet every rhombus containing four angles equal unto two right, it virtually contains two right in every one."

The fanciful sports of great minds are never without some advantage to knowledge. Browne has interspersed many curious observations on the form of plants, and the laws of vegetation; and appears to have been a very accurate observer of the modes of germination, and to have watched with great nicety the evolution of the parts of plants from their seminal principles.

He is then naturally led to treat of the number five; and finds, that by this number many things are circumscribed; that there are five kinds of vegetable productions, five sections of a cone, five orders of architecture, and five acts of a play. And observing that five was the ancient conjugal or wedding number, he proceeds to a speculation which I shall give in his own words; "the ancient numerists made out the conjugal number by two and three, the first parity and imparity, the active and passive digits, the material and formal principles in generative societies."

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These are all the tracts which he published: but many papers were found in his closet, some of them (says Whitefoot), designed for the press, were often transcribed and corrected by his own hand, after the fashion of great and curious writers."

Of these, two collections have been published; one by Dr. Tenison, the other in 1722 by a nameless editor. Whether the one or the other selected those pieces which the author would have preferred, cannot now be known: but they have both the d editor.] John Hase, Richmond Herald.-See Preface to Repertorium.

merit of giving to mankind what was too valuable to be suppressed; and what might, without their interposition, have, perhaps, perished among other innumerable labours of learned men, or have been burnt in a scarcity of fuel like the papers of Pereskius.

The first of these posthumous treatises contains "observations upon several plants mentioned in Scripture." These remarks, though they do not immediately either rectify the faith, or refine the morals of the reader, yet are by no means to be censured as superfluous niceties or useless speculations; for they often show some propriety of description, or elegance of allusion, utterly undiscoverable to readers not skilled in oriental botany; and are often of more important use, as they remove some difficulty from narratives, or some obscurity from precepts.

The next is "of garlands, or coronary and garland plants ;" a subject merely of learned curiosity, without any other end than the pleasure of reflecting on ancient customs, or on the industry with which studious men have endeavoured to recover them.

The next is a letter, "on the fishes eaten by our Saviour with his disciples, after his resurrection from the dead;" which contains no determinate resolution of the question, what they were, for indeed it cannot be determined. All the information that diligence or learning could supply, consists in an enumeration of the fishes produced in the waters of Judea.

Then follow " answers to certain queries about fishes, birds, and insects ;" and "a letter of hawks and falconry, ancient and modern:" in the first of which he gives the proper interpretation of some ancient names of animals, commonly mistaken; and in the other has some curious observations on the art of hawking, which he considers as a practice unknown to the ancients. I believe all our sports of the field are of Gothick original; the ancients neither hunted by the scent, nor seem much to have practised horsemanship as an exercise; and though, in their works, there is mention of "aucupium" and "piscatio," they seem no more to have been considered as diversions, than agri, culture or any other manual labour.

In two more letters he speaks of "the cymbals of the Hebrews," but without any satisfactory determination; and of "ropalick or gradual verses," that is, of verses beginning with a word of one syllable, and proceeding by words of which each has a syllable more than the former; as,

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"O Deus, æternæ stationis conciliator."-AUSONIUS.

e recover them.] To which Browne's attention was turned by the enquiries of Evelyn, who applied to him for assistance in his projected work on horticulture, and to whom this essay was enclosed, in a letter. -See Correspondence.

and, after his manner, pursuing the hint, he mentions many other restrained methods of versifying, to which industrious ignorance has sometimes voluntarily subjected itself.

His next attempt is "on languages, and particularly the Saxon tongue." He discourses with great learning, and generally with great justness, of the derivation and changes of languages; but, like other men of multifarious learning, he receives some notions without examination. Thus he observes, according to the popular opinion, that the Spaniards have retained so much Latin, as to be able to compose sentences that shall be at once grammatically Latin and Castilian: this will appear very unlikely to a man that considers the Spanish terminations; and Howell, who was eminently skilful in the three provincial languages, declares, that after many essays he never could effect it.

The principal design of this letter, is to show the affinity between the modern English and the ancient Saxon; and he observes, very rightly, that "though we have borrowed many substantives, adjectives, and some verbs, from the French; yet the great body of numerals, auxiliary verbs, articles, pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions, which are the distinguishing and lasting parts of a language, remain with us from the Saxon."

To prove this position more evidently, he has drawn up a short discourse of six paragraphs, in Saxon and English; of which every word is the same in both languages, excepting the terminations and orthography. The words are, indeed, Saxon, but the phraseology is English; and, I think, would not have been understood by Bede or Elfric, notwithstanding the confidence of our author. He has, however, sufficiently proved his position, that the English resembles its parental language, more than any modern European dialect.

There remain five tracts of this collection yet unmentioned; one "of artificial hills, mounts, or burrows, in England;" in reply to an interrogatory letter of E. D. whom the writers of Biographia Britannica suppose to be, if rightly printed, W. D. or Sir William Dugdale, one of Browne's correspondents. These are declared by Browne, in concurrence, I think, with all other antiquarians, to be for the most part funeral monuments. He proves, that both the Danes and Saxons buried their men of eminence under piles of earth, "which admitting (says he) neither ornament, epitaph, nor inscription, may, if earthquakes spare them, outlast other monuments: obelisks have their term, and pyramids will tumble; but these mountainous monuments may stand, and are like to have the same period with the earth.” In the next, he answers two geographical questions; one concerning Troas, mentioned in the Acts and Epistles of St. Paul,

which he determines to be the city built near the ancient Ilium; and the other concerning the Dead Sea, of which he gives the same account with other writers.

Another letter treats "of the answers of the oracle of Apollo at Delphos, to Croesus king of Lydia." In this tract nothing deserves notice, more than that Browne considers the oracles as evidently and indubitably supernatural, and founds all his disquisition upon that postulate. He wonders why the physiologists of old, having such means of instruction, did not enquire into the secrets of nature: but judiciously concludes, that such questions would probably have been vain; "for, in matters cognoscible, and formed for our disquisition, our industry must be our oracle, and reason our Apollo."

The pieces that remain are, "A prophecy concerning the future state of several nations;" in which Browne plainly discovers his expectation to be the same with that entertained lately with more confidence by Dr. Berkeley, "that America will be the seat of the fifth empire:" and "Museum clausum, sive Bibliotheca abscondita;" in which the author amuses himself with imagining the existence of books and curiosities, either never in being, or irrecoverably lost.

These pieces I have recounted as they are ranged in Tenison's collection, because the editor has given no account of the time at which any of them were written. Some of them are of little value, more than as they gratify the mind with the picture of a great scholar, turning his learning into amusement; or show upon how great a variety of enquiries the same mind has been successfully employed.

The other collection of his posthumous pieces, published in octavo, Lond. 1722, contains" Repertorium; or some account of the tombs and monuments in the cathedral of Norwich ;” where, as Tenison observes, there is not matter proportionate to the skill of the antiquary.

The other pieces are, "Answers to Sir William Dugdale's enquiries about the fens; a letter concerning Iceland; another relating to urns newly discovered; Some short strictures on different subjects;" and "A letter to a friend on the death of his intimate friend," published singly by the author's son in 1690. There is inserted, in the Biographia Britannica, "A letter

f postulate.] His perfect conviction of the Satanic influence exerted n oracles is strongly expressed in a passage of his Religio Medici, respecting the ground of his belief of their cessation at the coming of Jesus Christ; viz. the confession of the devil himself, in his oracle to Augustus.

g 1722.] This date was taken from a copy which had a reprint title. The book was published in 1712.