and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." This marriage could not but draw the raillery of contemporary wits* upon a man, who had just been wishing in his new book, "that we might procreate, like trees, without conjunction;" and had lately declared, that "the whole world was made for man, but only the twelfth part of man for woman;" and, that " man is the whole world, but woman only the rib or crooked part of man." Whether the lady had been yet informed of these contemptuous positions, or whether she was pleased with the conquest of so formidable a rebel, and considered it as a double triumph, to attract so much merit, and overcome so powerful prejudices; or whether, like most others, she married upon mingled motives, between convenience and inclination; she had, however, no reason to repent: for she lived happily with him one and forty years; and bore him ten2 children, of whom one son and three daughters outlived their parents; she survived him two years, and passed her widowhood in plenty, if not in opulence. : Browne having now entered the world as an author, and experienced the delights of praise and molestations of censure, probably found his dread of the publick eye diminished; and, therefore, was not long before he trusted his name to the criticks a second time for in 1646 he printed Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors; a work, which as it arose not from fancy and invention, but from observation and books, and contained not a single discourse of one continued tenor, of which the latter part rose from the former, but an enumeration of many unconnected particulars, must have been the collection of years, and the effect of a design early formed and long pursued, to which his remarks had been continually referred, and which arose gradually to its present bulk by the daily aggregation of new particles of knowledge. It is, indeed, to be wished, that he had longer delayed the publication, and added what the remaining part of his life might have furnished: the thirty-six years which he spent afterwards in study and experience, would doubtless have made large additions to an Enquiry into Vulgar Errors." He published in 1672 the sixth edition, with some improvements; but I think rather with explications of what he had already written, than any new heads of disquisition. But with the work, such as the author, whether hindered from 66 * Howell's Letters, book i. 60, and Religio Bibliopola. zten.] Eleven.-See Pedigree. + Life, &c. continuing it by eagerness of praise, or weariness of labour, thought fit to give, we must be content; and remember, that in all sublunary things, there is something to be wished, which we must wish in vain. This book, like his former, was received with great applause, was answered by Alexander Ross, and translated into Dutch and German, and not many years ago into French. It might now be proper, had not the favour with which it was at first received filled the kingdom with copies, to reprint it with notes partly supplemental and partly emendatory, to subjoin those discoveries which the industry of the last age has made, and correct those mistakes which the author has committed, not by idleness or negligence, but for want of Boyle's and Newton's philosophy." He appears, indeed, to have been willing to pay labour for truth. Having heard a flying rumour of sympathetick needles, by which, suspended over a circular alphabet, distant friends or lovers might correspond, he procured two such alphabets to be made, touched his needles with the same magnet, and placed them upon proper spindles: the result was, that when he moved one of his needles, the other, instead of taking by sympathy the same direction, "stood like the pillars of Hercules." That it continued motionless, will be easily believed; and most men would have been content to believe it, without the labour of so hopeless an experiment. Browne might himself have obtained the same conviction by a method less operose, if he had thrust his needles through corks, and then set them afloat in two basons of water. Notwithstanding his zeal to detect old errors, he seems not very easy to admit new positions; for he never mentions the motion of the earth but with contempt and ridicule, though the opinion, which admits it, was then growing popular, and a This book, &c.] See Preface to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, for a detailed account of the replies to it, as well as of the various editions and translations of the work itself. If the present edition be deemed but imperfectly to answer the doctor's description of what it ought to be, I can only offer the plea, that arrangements (on whose efficiency I was justified in relying) have been, in a great measure, frustrated, by the nonfulfilment of engagements, on which those arrangements depended. By this disappointment (which I submitted to repeated delays, in the vain hope of avoiding), I have been deprived of some important scientific illustrations, precisely of the character described in the paragraph before us. b truth.] His willingness to take pains to disprove even the most absurd fables, is well evinced in his chapter On the Three Kings of Collein. was, surely, plausible, even before it was confirmed by later observations. The reputation of Browne encouraged some low writer to publish, under his name, a book called "Nature's Cabinet Unlocked;"* translated, according to Wood, from the physicks of Magirus; of which Browne took care to clear himself, by modestly advertising, that if any man had been benefited by it, he was not so ambitious as to challenge the honour thereof, as having no hand in that work."† In 1658 the discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk gave him occasion to write Hydriotaphia, Urnburial, or a Discourse of Sepulchral Urns, in which he treats with his usual learning on the funeral rites of the ancient nations; exhibits their various treatment of the dead; and examines the substances found in his Norfolcian urns. There is, perhaps, none of his works which better exemplifies his reading or memory. It is scarcely to be imagined, how many particulars he has amassed together, in a treatise which seems to have been occasionally written; and for which, therefore, no materials could have been previously collected. It is, indeed, like other treatises of antiquity, rather for curiosity than use; for it is of small importance to know which nation buried their dead in the ground, which threw them into the sea, or which gave them to birds and beasts; when the practice of cremation began, or when it was disused; whether the bones of different persons were mingled in the same urn; what oblations were thrown into the pyre; or how the ashes of the body were distinguished from those of other substances. Of the uselessness of all these enquiries, Browne seems not to have been ignorant; and, therefore, concludes them with an observation which can never be too frequently recollected. 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 these hopes Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits, against the 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 man, *Wood, and Life of Sir Thomas Browne. 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 C Mystically Considered.] He withstood the Copernican hypothesison 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. 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." 66 These are all the tracts which he published: but many papers were found in his closet, some of them (says Whitefoot), de. signed 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 deditor.] John Hase, Richmond Herald.-See Preface to Repertorium. |