SOURCE: Post, Jonathan F. S. “Elements of Style and The Politics of Laughter: Comic Autobiography in Religio Medici.” In Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 57-94. Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

[In the following essays, Post outlines the main elements of Browne's style, focusing on his Religio Medici and characterizing it as a text that lends itself to loose interpretation due to Browne's use of wit and comic improvisation.]

Whatever Browne's achievements were as a scientist and an Anglican apologist, he is best known today as a stylist who created one of the most distinctive and recognizable voices in the history of English prose. The “stylist,” Austin Warren reminds us in his valuable essay on Browne, is someone “whose originality lies not in his big ideas (his major concepts, often philosophically derivative and ‘eclectic’) but in his little ideas, his discriminations and nuances, his intellectual sensibility.”¹ Warren is not arguing that ideas are unimportant to Browne or that the author's style can be understood apart from its intellectual context; he is making the simple but valuable observation that in reading Browne's published and some of his unpublished work (not his domestic correspondences) we are always very conscious of the author's “attire.” Coleridge said as much when he remarked that Religio Medici “is a fine Portrait of a handsome man in his best Cloathes.”²

What is true of fashions in clothes, though, is also true of style: not everybody equally appreciates the dress, and among his many admirers Browne has had some conspicuous detractors. In his own day, Alexander Ross was the most vigilant in adopting a plain-style attack on the “Rhetoricall flourishes” of Religio. “Where is most painting, there is least beauty,” Ross admonishes the reader with proverbial zest, and then adds: “as I suspect that friendship, which is set out in too many Verball Complements; so doe I that Religion, which is trimmed up with too many Tropicall pigments, and Rhetoricall dresses.”³ In our day, Stanley Fish has played Abdiel to a Satanic Browne by ringing a more sophisticated change on Ross's anti-Papist remarks when he criticizes the author's art for failing to self-consume: “Browne's prose betrays no such modesty. It repeatedly calls attention to what it is doing, and what it is doing is displaying Browne to advantage, even when the content is, on its face, prejudicial to him.”⁴ Neither Ross nor Fish, like Warren or Coleridge, misreads this fundamental feature of the witty opacity of Browne's prose; they simply value its effects very differently. They do not like what they see: an art that is too playful, too self-conscious, too “proud” of its own being.

On the basis of sheer numbers, Browne's detractors have been heavily outvoted, but the considerable distance between his admirers and his antagonists is probably impossible to bridge in any but a flimsy way. As Lytton Strachey remarked in defending Browne's verbal eccentricities against the strictures of Edmund Gosse at the turn of this century, “there is a great gulf fixed between those who naturally dislike the ornate, and those who naturally love it. There is no remedy; and to attempt to ignore this fact only emphasizes it the more.”⁵ We might wish to expand Strachey's innocent “naturally” to include political, psychological, moral, and religious assumptions, and we might also want to add, as Warren has demonstrated, that Browne wrote in more than one style, but we cannot escape observing that his is, above all, a literary person's prose—that is, a prose that happily indulges itself in what Roland Barthes includes more generally in “the pleasures of the text”: its own joyful linguistic operations.

Emerson, who was a careful reader of Browne, once remarked that “all good conversation, manners and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.”⁶ Although he need not have had Browne in mind when making his pronouncement or its sequel—that “Nature hates Calculators”—the remark nonetheless captures in distilled form the essence of Browne's prose: its spontaneous, well-mannered grandeur. Browne's prose is almost always polite, usually unpredictable, and occasionally lofty. At its very best, it makes “the moment great.” Whether through the effects of diction or syntax, the brief utterance of a simple sentence or the gradual revelation of a thought over the course of several paragraphs, Browne discovered a flexible style that was sufficiently rarefied to reveal the odd twists and paradoxes of his profoundly inquisitive imagination. In reading him, we are always aware of witnessing not just a recorder of detail but a connoisseur in the process of studying himself and his surroundings.

DICTION

One of the most remarkable features of Browne's style is certainly his language or, as Dr. Johnson said, his “many languages.”⁷ An omnivorous reader of ancient and modern texts as well as the author of a general tract “Of languages, and particularly of the Saxon tongue,” Browne was something of a literary cormorant who hatched an exotic species of Latinate English. Pseudodoxia, particularly, delivers a brood of verbal oddities nearly unequaled in the seventeenth century. “Reminiscential,” “paradoxologie,” “ampliate,” “empuzzle,” “decollation,” “immoderancy,” “farraginous,” “indigitate,” “augurial,” “tripudary,” “fabulosities,” “sententiosity,” “desume,” “extispicious,” “mundification,” and “consectory” are just some of the “expressions beyond meere English apprehensions” alluded to by the author in the preface and which appear in the first book. All are derived from Latin and cited by the Oxford English Dictionary; most are now obsolete, and some, like “empuzzle” and “immoderancy,” are the only examples given of the variant form. These are joined by the myriad of phrases, taken in this case from a few pages, which, without employing any neologisms, reveal their exoticism in pairs: Adam “infringed the omnisciency and essentiall ubiquity of his Maker” (1.2, p. 10); God is the infallible creator “in whose opticks there is no opacity” (p. 11); and at Judgment day, Satan will not “present unto God a bundle of calumnies or confutable accusations, but will discreetly offer up unto his Omnisciencie, a true and undeniable list of our transgressions” (p. 12).

Needless to say, diction as intoxicated as this is open to both praise and ridicule, serious imitation and burlesque, and Joyce knew that he had located a howler when in Ulysses he parodically compressed Browne's “forget not how assuefaction unto any thing minorates the passion from it” (CM [Christian Morals], 3.10, p. 234) into “Assuefaction minorates atrocities,” and then added for good measure, “as Tully saith of his darling Stoics.”⁸ But however pompous certain passages might seem, Coleridge went too far when he accused Browne of corrupting the true classical style, epitomized in Hooker, by introducing “learned words merely because they were learned.”⁹ Coleridge's version of a linguistic “fall” (like Eliot's “dissociated sensibility”) is simply too schematic to be persuasive. We might just as easily argue, as Bulwer-Lytton did,¹⁰ that Browne enriched the language and cite as evidence some of his coinages that are still with us, like “incontrovertible” and “retrogression,” even, happily, “literary” and “medical.” But it is also inaccurate in another way, for Browne's use of “learned words” was not just for the sake of appearance. Johnson, who was temperamentally less disposed than Coleridge to liking Browne's style, was closer to the truth when he remarked that “in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term.”¹¹

If Browne habitually employed Latinate diction in varying degrees, he rarely forgot his native Saxon tongue. The homespun word or phrase served to give ballast to his imagination, anchoring it in the particulars of a reality that both illuminated and defined the iridescence of the abstraction. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this practice occurs in the next to last paragraph of Urne-Buriall, a passage sufficiently pleasing to its author that he copied it almost verbatim at the end of Christian Morals: “And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kisse of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them” (UB [Urne-Buriall], chap. 5, pp. 124-25). As George Williamson notes, Browne uses here “five Latin abstractions and three metaphorical extensions to adumbrate the mystical experience,”¹² but we should also observe that if the abstractions hint at a future ecstasy (Browne even gives us a sense of an alphabetical scale operating with the abstractions), the biblical plainness of “kisse of the Spouse,” in its sensuous immediacy, moves us suddenly a half-step forward in our “handsome anticipation of heaven.”

One of the hallmarks of Browne's style is, in fact, the witty conjunction of the plain and the ornate, the mundane and the extravagant. Browne loved, for instance, to place in parallel sequence words with similar meanings but different roots. The repetition of “funambulatory” and “narrow path” in Christian Morals is a case in point; so, too, is the earthy variation of “belching” and “eructation” in Pseudodoxia, to which we might add nearly at random doublets like “the account of the Pensill or hanging gardens of Babylon,” “one common name and appelation,” “allurements and baits of superstition,” “we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature,” and “these are certainly the Magisteriall & master pieces of the Creator” (my italics). Whole phrases could also turn gracefully on the repetition of meaning in a different key, as Douglas Bush points out in a passage like “Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gantlet in the cause of Veritie.”¹³ Browne could even orchestrate a symphony of simple and Latinate diction to help produce a sense of the ineluctable and unwieldy march of error which is so much the subject of Pseudodoxia: “And as simple mistakes commonly beget fallacies, so men rest not in false apprehensions, without absurd and inconsequent diductions, from fallacious foundations, and misapprehended mediums, erecting conclusions no way inferrible from their premises” (1.4, p. 22). The key to the verbal wit here is how “simple mistakes” generates a Latin lexicon of error (“fallacies,” “false apprehensions,” “fallacious foundations,” etc.), which, like the reasoning process it criticizes, sinks deeper in a linguistic mire the further along it goes.

The most exotic of Browne's bilingual effects belong, of course, to the fifth chapter of Urne-Buriall and to The Garden of Cyrus. Much of the strangeness of Urne-Buriall is due to the oscillating tide of Latin and Saxon phrases in which the splendid pomp of ambition is played off against the blunt reality of gravestones, while The Garden of Cyrus delivers an extraordinary mélange of simply sown and ripe diction. In the latter work, pine trees do not remain pine trees for long; closer inspection reveals “the Rhomboidall protuberances in Pineapples maintaining this Quincuncial order unto each other” (chap. 3, p. 145). Elsewhere, this antiquarian-turned-Adam muses on “favagonious Sockets” and the “exiguity and smallnesse of some seeds”; he also names and exults his surrounding with a language as richly varied as the local botanical setting will allow: “Thus hath nature ranged the flowers of Santfoyne, and French honey suckle; and somewhat after this manner hath ordered the bush in Jupiters beard, or houseleek; which old superstition set on the tops of houses, as a defensative against lightening, and thunder. The like in Fenny Sengreen or the water Souldier; which, though a militarie name from Greece, makes out the Roman order” (chap. 3, p. 144).

It is a cliché but an accurate one to say that Browne's unusual linguistic feats reflect the wit and fecundity of God's creation. Like Donne and a host of authors in the seventeenth century who subscribed to the theory of correspondences, Browne regarded God as the ultimate artist and the world as an exemplary text, in which, to quote Religio, “there was never any thing ugly, or mis-shapen, but the Chaos.” This is not to argue that everything should conform to a single rule of order, but to suggest that since all things express the essence of God, Browne saw before him nearly an endless plenitude of imitative possibilities. Even “in monstrosity,” Browne writes, “there is a kind of beauty, Nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts, as they become sometimes more remarkable than the principall Fabrick.” In the case of Browne's prose, there is, by extension, no such thing as a “monstrosity,” only the ingenious contrivances of irregular parts, which, viewed in detail, can sometimes seem “more remarkable than the principall Fabrick” (RM [Religio Medici], 1.16, p. 16).

FORMAL STRUCTURES

Along with the witty conjunction of Latin and Saxon diction, Browne favored certain rhetorical figures. Alliteration is the most obvious, as in the sputtering mouthful of “protuberances in Pineapples” or the lush “flowers of Santfoyne, and French honey suckle.” Inevitably relying on this device to highlight some of his more outrageous bilingualisms like “Conigerous animals, which chew the cudd,” he also underscored through sound the balancing effect of doublets such as “Magisteriall & master pieces,” “in this universe of stairs and manifest scale of creatures,” and the memorable “divided and distinguished worlds”; and he frequently used alliteration to achieve moments of graceful symmetry and closure, as in the concluding phrase “came down by Cancer, and ascended by Capricornus.” But however conscious Browne was of the sound of his prose—Strachey reported loving to read him aloud in some hall that smelled of antiquity—he was not a slave to “the sweet falling of the clauses,” as Bacon accused the followers of Cicero of being.¹⁴ Alliteration in Browne is nearly always a figure of thought; it helps to signal the odd twists of mind, the slight or sudden change in the argument, or to suggest a fine nuance of meaning. It rarely seems gratuitous and is never used, as it was with Ciceronians, to structure the symmetrical development of an idea.

Browne was especially fond of at least three other rhetorical figures. He exercised frequently a device called “polyptoton,” which is the repetition of words from the same root but in different forms or with different endings. “As there were many Reformers, so likewise many reformations” is a simple instance of repetition with variation that strengthens the pat inevitability of the simile. Or again Browne gives us the felicitously wistful, “Gardens were before Gardiners, and but some hours after earth,” in which the root echoing reinforces our sense of the primal aspects of paradise. This device can be overused, as occurs in Christian Morals (“Pursue Virtue virtuously,” or the coinage of “novity” in conjunction with “novellizing”), but it can also lend a note of sublime resonance to a passage, as happens in the last chapter of Urne-Buriall: “Time which antiquates Antiquities” and “there is nothing strictly immortall, but immortality.” In both cases, the sharp juxtaposition of nearly identical abstractions makes the meaning of each nearly impenetrable and contributes to our sense of the gnomic inscrutability of the human condition. A second device frequently employed is “homoioteleuton,” the use of different words with similar endings: “And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation”, etc. (my italics). Particularly common among his Latinate expressions, the figure could help generate rhythmic grandeur by producing a kind of rhymed prose or, as happens often in Pseudodoxia, it could be used to indicate a high-blown irritation with error. The third figure, “catachresis,” defines a device for which Browne is perhaps best known—a wildly unlikely metaphor. Sometimes referred to as a “conceit” or more generally as “metaphysical wit,” it describes the unusual leaps in Browne's thought and lies partially behind the author's warning in the preface to Religio that there are “many things [in it] to be taken in a soft and flexible sense.” Perhaps the most striking example of this occurs when he is criticizing human arrogance in attributing things to nature that belong to God, “which if with reason we may doe, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writings.”

On a slightly different plane, Browne's habitual dubiety or skepticism helped to generate a lexicon of genteel uncertainty that has perhaps become his single most identifiable idiom. Since “Some Truths seem almost Falshoods, and some Falshoods almost Truths” (CM [Christian Morals], 2.3, p. 220), Browne rarely insists on a single absolute point of view. He continually emphasizes shades of meaning, partial perspectives, a desire for precision that admits to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of the task. If Donne was the great practitioner of “masculine persuasive force,” Browne was the afficionado of “Probably” and “Perhaps,” words he noted regretfully that “will hardly serve to mollify the Spirit of captious Contradictors” (CM, 2.3, p. 220). “I could easily believe,” “I am of the opinion,” “I am half of the opinion,” “I cannot peremptorily deny,” “it is a riddle to me” is the malleable idiom of Religio, not “it is a truth universally acknowledged.” Browne is always attempting “to difference [him] self neerer, & draw into a lesser circle”—to think, like Hamlet, precisely on the event—but the multiple faces of truth keep shifting before his gaze: “That Miracles are ceased, I can neither prove, nor absolutely deny, much lesse define the time and period of their cessation” (1.27, p. 27). “Whether Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam, I dispute not; because I stand not yet assured which is the right side of a man” (1.21, p. 22). In Pseudodoxia, these noun clauses pick up more scholarly heft, but their effect remains largely the same: to reveal a mind holding, in studious fashion, an idea at a distance and turning it around for inspection. Often yielding only further questions, these extended clauses generate in turn an almost limitless number of expressions of uncertainty, beguiling in their variety and, in a work like Urne-Buriall, profoundly moving in their cumulative force. I doubt whether any author in English has found half as many ways to keep the door slightly ajar. It seems only right that “precarious” should be among his neologisms.

SYNTAX

If Browne was a connoisseur of doubt, he achieved this distinction by using a frequently rarefied diction, which lent an elevated tone to his prose, in conjunction with a loose or libertine syntax, especially as exemplified in the recently discovered essay “form.”¹⁵ Historically speaking, the personal essay came into being in the Renaissance with Montaigne, who favored the mode because of its provisional, introspective quality; and though Browne was later to disclaim having read more than a smattering of the French author before writing Religio (K [Keynes], 3:290), there can be no denying the similar purpose to which each put the essay. Both viewed it as an appropriate vehicle for trying out an idea (this is the root meaning of “essayer,” as Montaigne made clear). It had no fixed format, no established vocabulary, no predetermined topic. It could be varied according to personal taste and situation, which meant it could embrace both the serious and the whimsical, the grand and the mundane, the contemplation of death as well as the tickle in an ear; and in doing so, it served as an ideal medium to reveal the inner configurations of the author's personality. But in his wish “to be delineated in [his] own genuine, simple, and ordinary fashion,” Montaigne also had to seek out a different stylistic strategy from that current Ciceronian model favored by his contemporaries. The Ciceronian period emphasized rhetorical balance, symmetrical sound patterns, graduated sequences of thought, and a copious display of language. As a highly polished and formal prose with its origins in oratory, though, its principal effects were also limited. It generally avoided sudden intellectual turns, which would have been difficult for listeners to follow, and its “finished” style was inhospitable to conveying the motions of thought as they apparently occurred to the author in the process of writing. It denied a sense of the mind working naturally and spontaneously even if that impression was sometimes a carefully contrived effect.

In rejecting Cicero, Montaigne helped to initiate a stylistic change for the seventeenth century whose full effects are still disputed but general outlines are clear. Writers like Bacon, Burton, and Browne, though very different from each other, were nonetheless alike in preferring a style more suited to reflecting the complexities of empirical reality. For Bacon this meant emphasizing a “language of things,” an idea that became the rallying cry for a “scientific” prose later in the century. Burton attended more to the hectic motions of the “travelling” intellect:

'Tis not my study or intent to compose neatly, which an orator requires, but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages [winding]; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow; now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected.¹⁶

And Browne, who was both natural philosopher and personal essayist, alternated between something like an attempt at a factual reportage of the bizarre and the idiosyncracies of private narration. Grouped generally together under the broad category of anti-Ciceronians, these authors as well as others adopted a fundamentally asymmetric syntax. Achieved largely by varying concise, seried utterances of differing length with loose, run-on sentences often held together by weak ligatures, it helped to give the effect, in Morris Croll's well-known formula, of portraying “not a thought, but a mind thinking, or in Pascal's words, la peinture de la pensée.” The anti-Ciceronians “knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced.”¹⁷

It is impossible to do justice here to the complexities of this historical change, but we can understand at least how Browne assimilated into his own prose some of the syntactic habits of this “movement.” Except for rare occasions, Browne eschewed the fully articulated Ciceronian period. He favored a combination of the curt utterance, associated particularly with Seneca, and a loose or libertine syntax made popular by Montaigne, though Browne generally resisted the vigorous aphorisms of the later Bacon and Burton's eccentric prolixity. Almost any passage from Religio will serve as an example of his personal “essay” style; for the purpose of illustration, I have chosen one of the shorter sections in order to give a sense of the full sweep of Browne's thought:

I thanke 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 joyes of the one than endure the misery of the other; to be deprived of them is a perfect hell, & needs me thinkes no addition to compleate our afflictions; that terrible terme hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof: I feare God, yet am not afraid of him, his mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before his judgements afraid thereof: these are the forced and secondary method of his wisedome, which he useth but as the last remedy, and upon provocation, a course rather to deterre the wicked, than incite the vertuous to his worship. I can hardly thinke there was ever any scared into Heaven, they goe the fairest way to Heaven, that would serve God without a Hell, other Mercenaries that crouch unto him in feare of Hell, though they terme themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty.

(1.52, p. 49)

What is most striking about this passage is its unpredictability. In contrast to the Ciceronian period, it does not work toward a single climactic moment but favors instead a series of perceptions held together by a paratactic syntax—that is, a syntax whose clauses are not rigorously subordinated but loosely conjoined either through weak connectors like “and” and “nor” or punctuation that marks a clean break in the author's thought: “I thanke God,” “I have so fixed,” “to be deprived,” “that terrible terme,” etc. Browne's asyndetic style plays down connections and plays up leaps in thought, not large ones but significant enough to give the impression that the author is musing rather than arguing, refining his perceptions about heaven and hell, not advancing a theory about salvation. Indeed, the degree to which the passage subordinates product to process can be readily glimpsed by the fact that Browne is describing a basic dialectic here in heaven and hell, but he refuses any obvious symmetrical pairing of them: their differences are illuminated only by the various angles provided by Browne's thought.

An even closer look reveals how Browne muses or “tries out” an idea. In a very limited sense, the “argument” of this paragraph is addressed and completed at the outset: Browne is not afraid of hell. But this “fact” is used only as the point of departure for a series of spiraling, loosely arranged thoughts. No sooner is the assertion made than it is repeated, as if the author were trying it on for size, “nor never grew pale at the description of that place.” The now refined thought comes to an abrupt halt, and the author turns his gaze in a different direction where the link to the previous clause is only implied. (Were Browne worried about the “logic” of his argument, he could easily have subordinated the second to the first clause by simply reversing the members of the second and adding a connecting locution like “now the reason. …”) The second clause then achieves a moment of symmetry (“and am afraid rather to lose the joyes of one than endure the misery of the other”) only to have its balance upset by the abrupt entry of a maxim, “to be deprived. …” After another clause, loosely attached to the previous one by the antecedent pronoun “That,” Browne again alters the direction of his gaze by suddenly announcing the paradox “I feare God, yet am not afraid of him,” a phrase that recollects but from a slightly different angle the opening pronouncement “I thanke God.” Through a series of partial antitheses, the remaining members of this sentence then dilate on the difference between being intimidated and wooed into heaven; these members also help to “explain” his opening expression of thanks. The entire section is finally concluded by another shift in gaze, “I can hardly think,” which, except for the closing subordinate clause (“though they terme themselves,” etc.), is composed of a series of short, disconnected utterances.

The obvious effect of Browne's asyndetic style, when used in conjunction with the personal “essay,” is spontaneous fancy, a lyrical association of perceptions anticipating a Joycean monologue.¹⁸ Indeed, the ending of The Garden of Cyrus, with its dreamy evocation of the author drifting off to sleep, has even encouraged at least one critic to speculate on whether Browne, admired by Coleridge and De Quincey, was himself an opium eater. (There is no evidence that he was.) But as whimsical and self-indulgent as he can sometimes be, it is a mistake to think of his style as suitable only for revealing the complexities of the inner life. As Robert Boyle made abundantly clear in 1661,¹⁹ the “essay” ought to serve as the preferred medium for recounting scientific experiments; and though Browne is not held up by Boyle as a specific model for imitation, he could certainly make his prose into a precise instrument for rendering, in an undogmatic idiom, the particularities of the world around him. Pseudodoxia, Urne-Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus—all in varying degrees scientific works—possess a number of passages memorable for their sheer descriptive power, for their ability to convey a keen sense of the observing eye in operation. The best instances almost always involve small things, like the celebrated glo-worm passage in Pseudodoxia (3.27, pp. 283-84), or the equally scrupulous rendering of the dead-watch beetle, which appears in the same work and is short enough to quote in full:

Few ears have escaped the noise of the Dead-watch, that is, the little clickling sound heard often in many rooms, somewhat resembling that of a Watch; and this is conceived to be of an evil omen or prediction of some persons death: wherein notwithstanding there is nothing of rational presage or just cause of terrour unto melancholy and meticulous heads. For this noise is made by a little sheath-winged gray Insect found often in Wainscot, Benches, and Wood-work, in the Summer. We have taken many thereof, and kept them in thin boxes, wherein I have heard and seen them work and knack with a little proboscis or trunk against the side of the box, like a Picus Martius, or Woodpecker against a tree. It worketh best in warm weather, and for the most part, giveth not over or under nine or eleven stroaks at a time. He that could extinguish the terrifying apprehensions hereof, might prevent the passions of the heart, and many cold sweats in Grandmothers and Nurses, who in the sickness of children, are so startled with these noises.

(2.7, p. 153)

The passage is an exquisite rendering of sensed experience, set down in absolutely limpid but not lifeless prose. Browne is able to take us immediately into the situation with the quietly dramatic and inclusive opening (“Few ears have escaped the noise of the Deadwatch”), after which he reveals the keenness of his own auditory and visual imagination. “Knack” is just the right word (it is of echoic origin) to convey a sense of the insect's sound, while the allusion to the woodpecker as well as to the number of strokes—nine or eleven, not ten—gives the passage a further descriptive precision, a precision underscored by the conscious glossing of technical Latin terminology with native expressions. Finally, the brief “essay” is concluded with a reflexive remark that highlights, through a domestic reference, the modest significance of both the scientist and the essayist, the person who witnesses the fact and the individual capable of reporting it. No passage better reveals the combined qualities of Browne's mind: its human, scientific, and literary bent.

REVISIONARY TACTICS: A LETTER TO A FRIEND

Browne was a careful observer of himself and nature; he was also a continual and careful reviser of his prose. His writings, remarked his friend and first biographer, Whitefoot, “were often Transcribed, and Corrected by his own Hand, after the Fashion of Great and Curious Wits.”²⁰ We have ample evidence of the care Browne took in revising the “pirated” Religio, which required both emending “more than six hundred and fifty items” and adding substantially to the pirated text; working from manuscript fragments, Jeremiah Finch has also helped us to appreciate the transmutation of some of the prose in The Garden of Cyrus into art.²¹ And, of course, Pseudodoxia was continually being updated with new information. But perhaps the best view afforded of the author in his study occurs with A Letter to a Friend, Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend, which exists in both a manuscript version preserved in the British Library (Sloane 1862) and the substantially altered and amplified text as first printed in 1690, eight years after Browne's death. The two versions, when examined together, can tell us much about the fine points of Browne's craft and something about the associative thematics that keep his published writings from coming across as being simply a series of acute but fragmentary observations.

The “occasion” that prompted the letter was in all likelihood the death of Robert Loveday in 1656. Loveday was from an ancient family from East Suffolk, a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and a translator of some note: suffering from consumption, he was attended by Browne in the final stages of his illness. The person addressed was probably Sir John Pettus. Also of an ancient family, Pettus was from a village just outside of Norwich, a close friend of Loveday, and known to Browne.²² Whether the manuscript represents a loose copy made of a letter actually sent to Pettus or is itself an intermediary development in the process of revision is difficult to tell. But I doubt that it represents a recension of the manuscript version of the Letter as printed in 1690. Frank L. Huntley makes this interesting suggestion, based in part on assumptions involving growing pressures in the seventeenth century for a more “scientific” prose; but it is still hard to imagine why Browne would have spent time bothering to prune a work so evidently unfit for publication in that form, even in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.²³ It is also difficult to assign a precise date for the composition of A Letter. Internal evidence points to 1673: Browne alludes to a work published in 1654 as having been written “scarce twenty Years ago” (pp. 184-85); but the reference need only mean that Browne was tidying up a work for publication in that year and then, perhaps for reasons of decorum, decided against sending it.

The manuscript version is medically informative and sympathetic in tone but hardly a work of art. The finished Letter, thought Pater (and he was quickly seconded by Symonds), belonged in the company of Urne-Buriall as “the best justification of Browne's literary reputation.”²⁴ The difference between the two versions is clear from the outset. The manuscript begins on a dutiful, earthbound note: “I am sorry you understood so little concerning that worthy gentleman your deare freind & that I must also performe that unwelcome office to tell you Ad portam rigidos calces extendit, hee is dead & buried & by this time no punie in the famous nations of the dead. for though hee left this world not many dayes ago, yet every hower largely addeth unto that Dark societe. & considering the incessant mortallity of mankind you cannot well conceave there dyeth in the whole world fewer then a thousand an hower” (p. 249). The printed text, on the other hand, opens bearing the full regalia of Browne's high style:

Give me leave to wonder that News of this nature should have such heavy Wings, that you should hear so little concerning your dearest Friend, and that I must make that unwilling Repetition to tell you, Ad portam rigidos calces extendit, that he is Dead and Buried, and by this time no Puny among the mighty Nations of the Dead; for tho he left this World not very many days past, yet every hour you know largely addeth unto that dark Society; and considering the incessant Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive there dieth in the whole Earth so few as a thousand an hour.

(p. 179)

The formalized “Give me leave” immediately displaces the informal “I am sorry.” “Wonder,” suggesting both speculation and grandeur, takes over. News is mythologized (bearing wings like Mercury) and heightened through genteel alliteration (the image also looks ahead to the “Mercurisms” and “Airy Nuncio's” added to the second paragraph in the 1690 text). And the syntax has been made more obviously symmetrical. The cumulative effect of the rhythms now serves both to set off the Latin tag from Persius in the ceremonial manner of a burial service and to solemnize further and ennoble the message of the last clause: “that he is Dead and Buried.” Small as it is, the simple substitution of “mighty” for “famous” in referring to the “Nations of the Dead” reveals the touch of an author who values sense as well as sound. It sharpens the contrast with “Puny,” suggests more exactly the theme of “the incessant Mortality of Mankind,” and continues to orchestrate the grand note. That the revisions should include at the outset at least one doublet (second paragraph) also seems almost inevitable: “the usuall way of knowledge” becomes the less usual and more resonant “common Road, and Appian way of Knowledge,” a phrase that, besides adding another mortuary echo to the opening, demonstrates how, even when Browne wants to talk about something being ordinary, he is rarely ordinary in doing so.

Elevating his introduction, Browne sought to heighten his role as physician. He considerably expanded the amount of medical lore in the original to include a discussion of Egyptian dentistry (p. 184), a brief history of countries especially hostile to certain illnesses (p. 185), the different ways favored by physicians in predicting consumption—“Cardan eagerly views the Nails” (p. 183)—and the various coughs afflicting animals and man (pp. 185-86). He also amplified sections already containing esoteric speculation. To his discussion in the original noting how the dying man resembled his uncle (grandmother in the manuscript), he added a resonant account of our endings being like our beginnings in which “in our Retreat to Earth, [we] may fall upon such Looks which from community of seminal Originals were before latent in us” (p. 180). And in the fashion of Pseudodoxia, he questioned different authorities on general topics of human interest, such as the hour when most are born and die and whether disease is an historically increasing phenomenon: “Plato will tell us, that there was no such Disease as a Catarrh in Homer's time” (p. 185).

But the gesture that perhaps contributes most to our sense of Browne's expanded “presence” in the 1690 text occurs through the simple redeployment of material already available in the earlier version. In the manuscript, the third paragraph concludes with an ominous account of the power of medical predictions: “'tis as dangerous to bee condemned by a physician as a Judge” (p. 250). The fourth paragraph then moves on to consider the hopeless condition of the patient. But in the revised text, the passage that intervenes between these two is taken from further along in the manuscript where Browne describes his arrival on the scene: “Upon my first Visit I was bold to tell them who had not let fall all hopes of his Recovery, That in my sad Opinion he was not like to behold a Grashopper, much less to pluck another Fig” (p. 179). In the new version, Browne becomes the judging physician, his earlier “bold” assertion of opinion now more of a final utterance. The strikingly personal allusion to grasshoppers and figs also assumes a further note of remote pathos, an effect Browne was obviously seeking since he changed the earlier phrase, “much lesse to tast another figge” (p. 250) to the more proverbial and delphic “much less to pluck another Fig” (p. 179). Plucking or tasting figs is equally possible in Norfolk, but the finality of the gesture—a fig, like the patient, can only be plucked once—is what Browne is after, and the change is certainly a felicitous one.

It would be nearly impossible to trace the many local changes Browne made to the manuscript in formalizing and amplifying his discourse. But a broader glance at the “structure” of the two works, or rather their “shape” (“structure” is too architechtonic a term for describing the unfolding, organic quality of Browne's “essay”), can alert us to how the author links together his observations to create a text that is discursive and unified, ample yet still possessing a sense of direction. As an essayist, Browne rarely identifies in advance exactly where he is going (The Garden of Cyrus, with its areas of concentration spelled out in the subtitle, comes perhaps closest to being “signposted”); but after having gone the route with the author, we rarely sense that the ramble has been altogether random. The 1690 text, in the light of the earlier version, helps us to understand why this is so.

The manuscript is at best loosely organized. In the first six paragraphs, Browne describes the patient's hopeless condition, after which he moves on to consider a number of separate and discrete phenomena: the victim's emaciated condition, his “soft departure,” hour of death, childhood sickness (rickets), the possible significance of the day of his death, his charity, a vague link with Julius Scaliger, and finally his Christian sentiments, the last of which the author extends briefly to the recipient in the form of a few pious warnings about laying up one's treasures while healthy. The beginning remarks have a “logic” to them and the concluding ones move in an obviously eulogistic direction, but the intervening paragraphs possess little continuity. Browne jumps about from topic to topic, without attempting either to forge small links between paragraphs or to suggest larger thematic patterns running through the work as a whole. Not surprisingly, the manuscript has been often described as fragmentary.

The 1690 text, as Norman Endicott points out, “is in its parallel part, about two and a half times as long as the manuscript.”²⁵ The part that is not parallel involves some eighteen admonitory paragraphs attached to the end of the printed text; they also reappear in a slightly revised form at the beginning of Christian Morals. But with or without the extended ending, the 1690 version possesses a discernible design that both enriches the particular observations and gives a cumulative solemnity to the whole essay.

The later text moves through four large, thematically interrelated stages. The first (pars. 1-8, pp. 179-83), although stylistically heightened and slightly rearranged, remains much the same as in the earlier version: with a graver eye toward immediately consoling his “friend” on the loss of his “intimate friend,” Browne gives the general circumstances of the victim's hopeless condition. The signal change here involves retrieving from the manuscript some fragmentary observations on coincidences concerning Charles V and Antipater (they appear also in Browne's commonplace book) and tying them more tightly to the specific occasion of the patient's death. In the manuscript, this material appears arbitrarily after a discussion of the patient's beard. In the 1690 text, it is moved forward so it evolves naturally from Browne's discussion of the specific circumstances surrounding the time of the victim's death. The material is also more carefully integrated into the structure of “coincidences” running throughout the 1690 version. In the earlier text and repeated in the later one, Browne reports that, in contrast to Charles V and Antipater, who both experience significant events on their birthdays—one being crowned and the other (perhaps like Browne himself) dying—the patient lived fifteen days beyond the anniversary of his nativity to the surprise of some bedside viewers. In the amplified 1690 text, however, Browne adds another, even more compelling, example of coincidence: “Certain it is he died in the dead and deep part of the Night, when Nox might be most apprehensibly said to be the Daughter of Chaos, the Mother of Sleep and Death, according to old Genealogy; and so went out of this World about that hour when our blessed Saviour entred it, and about what time many conceive he will return again unto it” (pp. 181-82). The additional passage serves now not only to link the victim thematically with these other men; it also suggests the deeper comforts of a spiritual bond that will be orchestrated more fully at the end.

The middle portion of the 1690 text has been considerably amplified with new material, but the expansion also leads to a greater clarity of focus. Beginning with his description of how “in this consumptive Condition and remarkable Extenuation he came to be almost half himself” (p. 183), Browne in a second movement descends into the particulars of bodily degeneration, as if giving an anatomy lesson (pars. 9-15, pp. 183-86). His description of the patient's beard, the subject of a single, floating paragraph in the manuscript, is joined to paragraphs on teeth, coughing, and lungs, anatomical fragments now meant to be seen and experienced by the reader as fragments, disconnected from the whole—the patient is “half himself”—and yet, as images of the body, belonging together. In a third movement, Browne then shifts his gaze to questions concerning the head and intellect (pars. 16-21, pp. 186-88). Four paragraphs on interpreting dreams of the fatally ill, absent from the manuscript, are now used to rarefy our perspective on the dying man as he prepares to leave the world, a refinement sustained and continued by the following two paragraphs in which Browne describes the patient's indifference to worldly things. The first, added to the 1690 text, describes the virtuous attitude of the patient about not having children since he could now be “amply satisfied that his Disease should dye with himself” (p. 187). The second passage, contained in the manuscript but unconnected to any larger idea or theme, now evolves out of this transcendent attitude; like Julius Scaliger, he “left the Poetry of his Epitaph unto others” (p. 188).²⁶

With the passage on Scaliger in place, Browne then turns in the final movement to eulogize the dead man: to supply, in effect, the poetry of an extended epitaph (pars. 22-30, pp. 188-90). Considerably amplified from the earlier version, these paragraphs further underline the internal, spiritual qualities of the dead man, qualities that insure his status as an exemplary Christian. To a discussion of his good works in the earlier text, Browne contributes some hagiographical touches by comparing the dead man to the ancient martyrs. And by repositioning and refining the phrase in the manuscript about how “to be dissolved, and be with Christ, was his dying ditty” (p. 189; “sick dittie” in the manuscript [p. 255]) so that it appears halfway through the eulogy (not at the outset as in the earlier version), Browne orchestrates a sense of upward movement in the conclusion. The final allusion to the Pauline new man, hinted at earlier in the added material involving the hour of Christ's arrival, now acquires greater point as it brings the descriptive portion of The Letter to a sturdy but consoling close: “In brief, he cannot 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” (p. 190).

A reading as schematic as this certainly shears Browne's prose of what Lamb called its “beautiful obliquity.”²⁷The Letter is as full of unusual twists as any of Browne's important works, but attending to the broader rhythmic patterns within a context of stylistic revisions does point to how Browne stitched his various observations together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In the 1690 text, Browne is very much a “medical moralist of the mount,” as Endicott emphasizes, but the way the author heightens his style, increases the element of “Airy Nuncio's”—of dreaming—and arranges his text to suggest a loose progress from bodily to intellectual to spiritual concerns leaves room for what Pater impressionistically called Browne's habit in The Letter of assisting “at the spiritualizing of the bodily frame by natural process; a wonderful new type of a kind of mortified grace being evolved by the way.” Browne's expansions here are done with the intention of both adding and clarifying meaning, and the result is a work that, if not quite of the stature of the ones Browne saw through publication, still bears the unique stamp of his lofty but compassionate intelligence.

The attention Browne gives to expanding the vision of The Letter also helps to underscore one further aspect of his art. Browne was an “essayist” through and through. He never seriously attempted to write in any other form; and as an essayist, he recognized and occasionally articulated the particular advantages of the form as residing in part in the “collateral truths” gathered along the way, truths that might be more important than any final truth Browne, as an individual, saw himself capable of reaching. The danger of the essay, of course, is trivialization: the incessant concern with the insignificant or the inability to make the insignificant seem important, a charge Coleridge, rightly or wrongly, leveled against Montaigne when he called him “too often a mere amusing Gossip, a chit-chat [reporter] of Whims & Peculiarities that lead to nothing.”²⁸

Browne is not altogether exempt from these criticisms. Few readers will be riveted by every passing detail in Pseudodoxia, fewer still by much of the information in, say, his Miscellany Tracts. If the essay is in some sense a late Renaissance invention born out of a distrust of the grandiose, the pretentious, and the drive for power, it never entirely escapes the potential for ennui and trivia that presided over its creation. In a very real sense, it is the chosen genre of the unheroic, the natural countervoice to the epic. But in Browne, however—at least in the works usually designated as “major”—the local observation is never allowed full dominion. The grander view lurks in the diction. It is present in the expanding vision of the particular essays, the upward sweep of the Christian moralist conscious of the final claims made on wisdom. And it is heard in the larger unifying rhythms that underlie the individual works. Despite choosing to compose in a form later prized for being “familiar,” Browne is never just the person next door. At best, he drops in to remind us that he comes from somewhere else. …

.....

“So intrinsecal is every Man unto himself, that some doubt may be made, whether any would exchange his Being, or substantially become another Man.” Browne's perception of human identity as fundamentally and perhaps inalterably individualized occurs in A Letter to a Friend (p. 188), but it might very well serve as at least a partial gloss on Religio Medici, the first published of his writings, a work of youthful exuberance, and certainly one of the most singular and beguiling attempts at self-definition in the whole of English literature. To be sure, Browne's “memorial unto himself” is not original for being autobiographical. Augustine's Confessions and, if we consider them as autobiographies, Juliana of Norwich's Showings and The Book of Margery Kempe anticipated Religio in the genre of spiritual revelation, as did the spate of personal religious “histories” that began to appear early in the seventeenth century.²⁹ But Religio is without rival when it comes to recording the delicate whimsicalities out of which a person's faith might be spun. Browne's work has no single source or antecedent, only affinities with the essay, the epistle, and the meditation, genres that hardly possess sharp definition,³⁰ while to read some of the many imitations it inspired is frequently to witness the breaking of the proverbial butterfly over the wheel. The breezy appropriation of Religio for crude political purposes is fully evident in the expanded title of a work by H. N., Religio Bibliopolae (1691), a work generally attributed to the flamboyant bookseller, John Dunton (1659-1733): The New Practice of Piety Writ in Imitation of Dr. Browne's Religio Medici: or The Christian Virtuoso: Discovering the Right Way to Heaven between all Extreams: To which is added a Satyr on the House of Lords, for their Throwing out the Bill Against Occasional Conformity (1704). But the most resolute collapsing in the eighteenth century of Browne's carefully wrought discriminations perhaps belongs to Fielding's Parson Thwackum, who provides a thumping reductio ad absurdum of the first five sections of Religio: “When I mention Religion, I mean the Christian Religion; and not only the Christian Religion, but the Protestant Religion; and not only the Protestant Religion, but the Church of England.”³¹

Religio Medici is more vulnerable to slogans and paraphrase than almost any other work of seventeenth-century prose because it is preeminently a triumph of texture and mood. Coleridge recognized this fact at once. In objecting to Digby's pedantic criticisms, he identified Religio as a dramatic performance rather than a metaphysical argument,³² and this valuable distinction has since been upheld either implicitly or explicitly by most scholars as a basic rule for interpreting the work. Browne's “soft and flexible” rhetoric has therefore received the kind of New Critical scrutiny usually reserved for the poetry, not the prose, of the period, and the “self” portrayed in Religio has been accurately likened to quicksilver in its various shifts in shape.³³ Erasmus's Folly, Rabelais's Pantagruel, and Shakespeare's melancholy Jaques play continually in the shadows of Browne's imagination, while the author further complicates any attempt at a single perception of himself through brief asides like “let us speak like philosophers” or “to speak like a politician” and phrases that recollect at one moment his Pauline heritage and at another his affinity with classical authors like Horace and Lucan. Indeed, in reminding us of yet another of his roles—that of the physician—Browne highlights through pun the theatrical elements traditionally associated with his profession in the paintings and engravings of his day:³⁴ “Men that looke no further than their outsides thinke health an appertinance unto life, and quarrell with their constitutions for being sick; but I … have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that Fabrick hangs” (1.44, p. 42). The anatomist and dramatist in Religio are surely cut from the same cloth.

In the theater of Browne's imagination, the vision that animates and unites the various modes of action is the author's profoundly comic interpretation of reality. If Burton, the divine-turned-physician, is the great anatomist of melancholy, Browne, the physician-turned-divine, is the great exemplar of amiability. “Forbid him to be humorous,” writes Leslie Stephen, “and you might as well forbid him to speak at all.”³⁵ From his frequent perception of God as a witty trickster who keeps us guessing His meanings to his mordant recognition of himself as “wholesome a morsell for the wormes as any” (1.40, p. 39), Browne uncovers a universe in which wit and playfulness are not just pleasant accoutrements but generating principles. “There is a common Spirit that playes within us” (my italics), he notes, “yet makes no part of us, and that is the Spirit of God” (1.32, p. 31). “All that is truely amiable is God,” he intones near the end of Religio, “or as it were a divided piece of him, that retaines a reflex or shadow of himselfe” (2.14, p. 74). From this Neoplatonic outpost, the world could readily appear to him as “but a dreame, or a mockshow, and wee all therein but Pantalones and Antickes to my severer contemplations” (1.41, p. 40). “Pantalones,” perhaps cribbed from Jaques's “seven ages of man” speech, were the lean and foolish old men from Italian comedy. Browne even interpreted his saturnalian imagination as evidence that he “was borne in the Planetary houre of Saturne”: “I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company, yet in one dreame I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh my selfe awake at the conceits thereof” (2.11, p. 71). How seriously we are meant to take the disclaimer “I am no way facetious” seems to be part of the joke, and the wit becomes even more finely tuned if we think of Religio as perhaps one instance of his dreaming. After all, Browne readily conceived of his life as the stuff that dreams are made of—“a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece of Poetry” (2.11, p. 69)—and Religio is the means of this relation.

If Religio Medici places special value on witty improvisation and a comic vertigo in which we continually perceive all the world as a stage, Browne, like Erasmus before him, viewed the New Testament as the ultimate sanction for prizing the improbable. St. Paul's discussion of “the foolishness of God” (1 Corinthians 1:21) underscored the paradox of Christianity in which the low is made high, a “comic” action epitomized in the Incarnation and Resurrection; and when the apostle declaimed against the wisdom of the world for failing to understand the mysteries of Christianity, he established a perceptual mode that favored revelation over reason, the inspired folly of believing in the unbelievable over obeying only that which can be seen and demonstrated. In the Renaissance, moreover, Paul's famous injunction “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9) became something of an honored text for fools. Folly quotes it as “her portion” at the end of The Praise of Folly; Bottom scrambles its letters but snatches at its spirit in A Midsummer Night's Dream (4.1.200-219); and Browne alludes to it in his attempt to describe the indescribable, heaven and hell (1.49, p. 46). In this company of buffoons, Browne is easily the best behaved, but the author of Religio still observed “Bottom-like” moments, especially in his perception that “we all are monsters, that is, a composition of man and beast” (1.55, p. 52); and despite getting married in the interim, he retained in the authorized version of Religio his witty denunciation, borrowed from Folly, that coition “is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life” (2.9, p. 67).

Nonetheless, the comedy of Religio differs in degree if not in kind from the spirited ribaldry of Erasmus or the tipsy revelry of Shakespeare. When Browne reports going to a tavern, for instance, he does so in order to describe how his Pythagorean instincts allow him to transform the “vulgar” music heard there into “a profound contemplation of the first Composer” (2.9, p. 67), and it is worth noting that his one scatological reference appears in the form of a literary allusion to Rabelais (1.21, p. 22). Browne's wit is almost always the wit of rarefaction, of the genteel jibe, of the naif who “wonders” at the oddities of God's world and His creations, including man. It invites us, as George Meredith says of the comic spirit in general, to “become a citizen of the selecter world.”³⁶ Browne was therefore careful to dissociate himself altogether from satire and invective, literary modes in which the humor seemed decidedly earthbound and, from Browne's perspective, unbalanced. It was one thing to play at being a Jaques; it was another to endorse as a narrative strategy a melancholy eccentricity that might lead to madness. Democritus, who “thought to laugh the times into goodnesse, seemes to mee as deepely Hypochondriack, as Heraclitus that bewailed them” (2.4, p. 60). Like Sidney before him and Meredith afterward, Browne thought true comedy primarily a transcendental and yet socially unifying experience. It refined the sensibilities and asked the reader to see that in the common spirit playing within was a reflex or shadow of the divine.

BROWNE'S DOUBLE COMEDY

The comedy of Religio thus moves on two different but complementary levels, one of which includes something like a comedy of manners, a vision of how to act in this world. The other “higher” level is what Kierkegaard interpreted as “the comedy of faith,” a recognition that “there is an endless yawning difference between God and Man,” which, the more thoroughly it is explored, the more comical it seems, with the result that “the earnestness of one's faith is tested by one's ‘sensitiveness to the comical.’”³⁷ In the first instance, Browne musters his wit to define a flexible norm for religious behavior—to suggest the sanity of the Church of England. His religion, at the very least, is civilized and “reasonable”; the latter word is a key element in a leitmotif of conservatism that runs throughout the work and reappears conspicuously in the next to last sentence of Religio when the author identifies his hopes for happiness in this life as “my most reasonable ambition” (2.5, p. 75). Indeed, in setting a civilized tone for the entire work, the opening section insinuates its moderate posture in the syntax (a marvelous tightrope walk with negative phrases), in the deferential jibe at the public view of his profession, and in the witty way in which, amid a seemingly endless series of qualifications, Browne quietly orchestrates the triumph of his faith by the subtle transformation of “honorable” to “happy” to “glorious”:

For my Religion, though there be severall circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all, as the generall scandall of my profession, the naturall course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour, and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another; yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honorable stile of a Christian: not that I meerely owe this title to the Font, my education, or Clime wherein I was borne, as being bred up either to confirme those principles my Parents instilled into my unwary understanding; or by a generall consent proceed in the Religion of my Countrey: But having, in my riper yeares, and confirmed judgement, seene and examined all, I finde my selfe obliged by the principles of Grace, and the law of mine owne reason, to embrace no other name but this; neither doth herein my zeale so farre make me forget the generall charitie I owe unto humanity, as rather to hate then pity Turkes, Infidels, and (what is worse) Jewes, rather contenting my selfe to enjoy that happy stile, then maligning those who refuse so glorious a title.

“Though,” “neither-nor,” “yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation,” “not that I,” “but having,” “I finde my selfe obliged,” “neither doth herein my zeale”: this is the polite grammar of deference that assures us that even with the boast that he has “seene and examined all,” Browne is not going to foist his faith on anyone. The “generall charitie” he owes to humanity readily circumscribes his zeal.

As a citizen of the world, Browne thoroughly suffuses his religion with a verbal playfulness that simultaneously militates against a single reading of theology and works to recover some of the middle ground the author saw eroding through intensifying religious disputes. “His is the rhetoric of ‘the happy man,’” writes Anne Drury Hall, “even without the literary prop of a Sabine farm or an English country house.”³⁸ When he identifies himself as “of that reformed new-cast Religion, wherein I dislike nothing but the name” (1.2, p. 3), his coy omission of “Protestantism” raises a smile about the etymology of his faith that slides imperceptibly into a criticism of reformists who seem to be only reactionaries (protesters) against Rome. Three sections later, Browne manages to have a little fun with the inflammatory rhetoric of religious controversy when he establishes a standard of decorum but then immediately flirts with breaking his own rule: “It is as uncharitable a point in us to fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffes of the Bishop of Rome, to whom as a temporall Prince, we owe the duty of good language: I confesse there is cause of passion betweene us; by his sentence I stand excommunicated, Heretick is the best language he affords me, yet can no eare witnesse I ever returned to him the name of Antichrist, Man of sin, or whore of Babylon” (1.5, p. 6). It might be the method of charity to suffer without reaction, as Browne reminds us (1.5, p. 6), but his ventriloquism here, underscored by the challenge “yet can no eare witnesse” (when we are about to be made witnesses), is a way of entering the arena while claiming to be sitting on the sidelines. Nonetheless, momentarily mimicking an incensed Protestant with witty approval does not make a radical Puritan out of Browne. In the next breath, he distances himself from what he sees as the fulminations of pulpit invective by sputtering, with mocking alliteration, “that a good cause needs not to be patron'd by a passion.”

In these instances, Browne seems literally to mediate between Rome and Geneva with something like rambunctious good humor, but his more usual way of undermining the extremities of religious behavior is to subject differences to a genteel, even courteous, laughter of the mind. His quibble over the proper meaning of “martyr,” for instance, sets up a logical contradiction which he then adjudicates through irony: “The Councell of Constance condemnes John Husse for an Heretick, the Stories of his owne party stile him a Martyr; He must needs offend the Divinity of both, that sayes hee was neither the one nor the other” (1.26, p. 26). Rather than attempting the (impossible) task of deciding who is right, Browne simply throws the case out the window and offers a down-home, sympathetic moral about the folly of taking uncertainties for absolutes: “I have often pitied the miserable Bishop that suffered in the cause of Antipodes, yet cannot choose but accuse him of as much madnesse, for exposing his living on such a trifle, as those of ignorance and folly that condemned him.”

At times, Browne's humor involving religious schism can be so fine as to be altogether transcendent. Following his heated description of the “vulgarity of those judgements” that presume to determine the elect, he remarks with exasperation: “Thus whilst the mercies of God doth promise us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place” (1.56, p. 53). But what Browne urges at this moment is not a heavenly flash signaling a community of the saved or a zealous outburst against the presumptuous but a nearly unearthly sense of bemusement generated by the whole scene: “There must be therefore more than one Saint Peter, particular Churches and Sects usurpe the gates of heaven, and turne the key against each other, and thus we goe to heaven against each others wills, conceits and opinions, and with as much uncharity as ignorance, doe erre I feare in points, not onely of our own, but on anothers salvation.” The issue of church and sectarian “usurpation” is coolly distanced through the allusion to each “turning the key against” the other, an image that prepares the way for an even more discreet turn of phrase that leaves the whole matter of salvation still very much up in the air. Browne's use of the present tense in “we goe to heaven against each others wills” suggests a general sense of upward progress being made by everybody, as if there might be more than one Saint Peter after all; but the final clause narrows the passage, and we can only speculate on the mystery of who gets through the gate.

Despite being frequently fueled by the bizarre, one strand of Browne's wit always keeps moving us toward the center, toward a “reasonable” appreciation of both the “good life” and the good in life. As someone who has “seene and examined all,” he enjoys the odd verbal coinage as well as the worldly flourish of a foreign phrase. He gives a courtier's “Bezo las Manos” to Fortune in describing the marvelous adventures of his life—“the escapes of dangers, and hits of chance” (1.17, p. 17). He has enough Greek on hand to mock the hot skirmishes among grammarians who “hack and slash for the Genitive case in Jupiter” (2.3, p. 59), and he can politely twit the reader with French examples of the “opprobrious Epithets wee miscall each other” (2,4). Indeed, the very fact that Religio is presented as not so much a studied work as a spontaneous creation in which, as the author confesses in the preface, he “had not the assistance of any good booke, whereby to promote my invention or relieve my memory,” makes the whole a virtuoso performance achieved without even a preliminary pen biting in order to bring forth a truant muse. Classical and European literature as well as the Bible are at his finger tips, Browne would have us believe. Thoroughly at ease with himself and the world, he urges that “A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet bee forced to surrender; tis therefore farre better to enjoy her with peace, then to hazzard her on a battell” (1.6, p. 6). Enjoying the city in peace is synonymous in Religio with keeping the positive values traditionally associated with urban life: manners, civility, and intelligence.

And yet if Religio underscores the comedy of the good life in which reason and moderation are given definite values, the work never presumes to insist that these virtues are self-sufficient. Browne is only a partial prototype of the eighteenth-century “amiable humorist.” He certainly anticipates rational theologians like Isaac Barrow who remarked that “it is a scandalous misprision, vulgarly admitted, concerning Religion, that it is altogether sullen and sour requiring a dull, lumpish, morose kind of life, barring all delight, all mirth, all good humour.” But he would have refused Barrow's utilitarian attempt to deny fancy a significant place in religious experience.³⁹ In Browne's individualistic and whimsical vision, the earthly city is continually being absorbed—sometimes at very odd angles—by the City of God. The comedy of manners keeps dissolving into a higher comedy of faith. To paraphrase Owen Felltham: if mirth is good for the body, meditation irradiates the soul.⁴⁰

A perfect instance of this vertical climb occurs in part 1, section 11, which begins by wittily adapting a line from Horace to fit a decidedly Christian, even mystical, context: “In my solitary and retired imagination, (Neque enim cum porticus aut me lectulus accepit, desum mihi) I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate him and his attributes who is ever with mee, especially those two mighty ones, his wisedome and eternitie; with the one I recreate, with the other I confound my understanding.” With its allusion to Horace's “when I withdraw to my couch or go off for a walk through the colonnade, I never neglect myself,”⁴¹ Browne's opening line substitutes for the contemplation of the self the contemplation of God in an action that transposes the Horatian emphasis on the rational into a celebration of the irrational: “for who can speake of eternitie without a soloecisme, or thinke thereof without an extasie? Time we may comprehend, 'tis but five dayes elder then our selves, and hath the same Horoscope with the world; but to retire so farre backe as to apprehend a beginning, to give such an infinite start forward, as to conceive an end in an essence that wee affirme hath neither the one nor the other; it puts my reason to Saint Pauls Sanctuary.” The satirist's couch becomes “Saint Pauls Sanctuary,” a receding hall of paradoxes constructed out of Browne's perception of the vast discrepancy between man and God. But the comic note of well-being in Horace is not altogether eradicated in Religio. It is refined and elevated into a “recreation” that centers on the confounding of one's reason. “I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo” (1.9, p. 9), exults Browne in what has become the most famous in a long history of fideistic paraphrases on St. Paul's “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33).⁴²

Browne's comedy of faith, like Kierkegaard's but without the torturous anxiety, springs from his recognition of the very impossibility of knowing God except through the conscious devaluation of the intellect. In passage after passage, section after section, the author of Religio keeps asking his haggard and unreclaimed reason “to stoope unto the lure of faith” (1.10, p. 10). He meditates on the “wingy mysteries in Divinity” (1.9, p. 9)—the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. He sends his reason to school to learn “the wisedome of Bees, Aunts, and Spiders” (1.15, p. 15). He turns rational criticism of Scripture on its head by widening the context for uncertainty: “Whether Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam, I dispute not; because I stand not yet assured which is the right side of a man, or whether there be any such distinction in Nature” (1.21, p. 22). “The whole Creation is a mystery, and particularly that of man,” he solemnly observes and then ends a lengthy, technical account of the soul with a conclusion in which, except for discovering our general ignorance of ourselves, nothing is concluded: “Thus we are men, and we know not how, there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history, what it was before us, nor cannot tell how it entred in us” (1.36, p. 36).

Nothing, in fact, confirms Browne more in his faith than a wry smile or a good laugh generated by his recognition of the folly of human reason.⁴³ “Certainly it is not a warrantable curiosity, to examine the verity of Scripture by the concordance of humane history, or seek to confirme the Chronicle of Hester or Daniel, by the authority of Megasthenes or Herodotus,” he observes, and then adds: “I confesse I have had an unhappy curiosity this way, till I laughed my selfe out of it with a piece of Justine, where hee delivers that the children of Israel for being scabbed were banished out of Egypt” (1.29, p. 29). Browne's sense of the absurd keeps coming to his rescue: “I can answer all the objections of Satan, and my rebellious reason, with that odde resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est” (it is certain because it is impossible—1.9, p. 9). And with a witty sleight-of-hand, he can make a virtue out of a necessity and convert a posture of weakness into a position of triumph:

Some beleeve the better for seeing Christ his Sepulchre, and when they have seene the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily I blesse my selfe, and am thankefull that I lived not in the dayes of miracles, that I never saw Christ nor his Disciples; I would not have beene one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christs Patients, on whom he wrought his wonders; then had my faith beene thrust upon me, nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe & saw not.

Seeing is not believing to Browne, or at least not believing in the same happy and slightly reckless way. However much he might “doubt” his external vision—his reason—he is not a “doubting Thomas” when it comes to matters of faith, as the witty allusion to the biblical story of his namesake reveals (John 20:29). Browne's discipleship is very much a matter of choice, and he signals his freedom through his exuberant sense of play.

The interweaving of comic play and personal election that runs throughout Religio is, in fact, all but cinched at the end of part 1. Meditating on the possibility of his salvation, of which Browne is “confident and fully perswaded” but dares not take an oath, he runs a circle around St. Paul's severe injunction to “Worke out your salvation with feare and trembling” (1.59, p. 54). A humble soul conscious of “her owne unworthinesse,” Browne notes, needs no such trumpet blast. But in the process of sidestepping a favorite Puritan text which, as Calvin said, “honor[s] the Lord's power, while greatly abashing ours,”⁴⁴ Browne promotes the antithesis of work, fear, and trembling when he underscores the playfulness of imitating a paradox of Christ that also allows him to celebrate the comic implications of his election:

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 my selfe, for I was not onely before my selfe, 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 mee before she conceiv'd of Cain.

Christ's paradoxical reply to the unbelieving Jews in John 3:58 (“Before Abraham was, I am”) stimulates in Browne an outpouring of paradox, a rhetorical figure that Puttenham surnamed the “wonderer.”⁴⁵ In the sense that Dr. Johnson refused to honor,⁴⁶ Browne's life in Christ is “a miracle of thirty yeares” because, like Christ's, it reaches out through God to touch the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, of time. But what enthralls us here is not so much any definition of election and predestination for which Christ's words might supply a proof-text as the vertical rush—the sense of wonder—achieved through the witty compression of impossibilities. More than any oath might do, Browne's rhetoric works to persuade us of the giddy rapture that accompanies the probability, if not certainty, of salvation.

To be sure, Browne's sense of comic play did not eradicate all melancholy from his religious experience. Religio Medici certainly possesses a ground beat of sobriety that justifies C. A. Patrides's designation of Browne as “grave-merry,” but even when the author seems most dispirited, he always manages, in Joan Webber's memorable phrase, to pull “the sting from pain.”⁴⁷ In the midst of meditating on his own corruption, for instance, he announces that “the man without a Navell yet lives in me” (2.10, p. 69), a witty circumlocution that prevents us from taking his (and our) fallen Adamic condition too seriously. As for the general horrors of death, Browne can press them into nonexistence by delivering a parodically literalistic reading of a biblical text:

All flesh is grasse, is not onely metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves.

(1.37, p. 36)

The elegiac touches surrounding Isaiah's “all flesh is grasse” (40:6-7) are quickly converted by Browne into morbid grist for his comic mill, a conversion signaled first by the odd coinage “carnified,” meaning made into flesh, intensified through the mock horror over the “Anthropophagi,” and clinched in the burlesque reduction of the metaphoric to the literal in the phrase “this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers.” Indeed, Browne's wish to deprive us of a genuine glimpse into the abyss of despair underlies his excision from the authorized 1643 text of the one line in Religio containing suicidal overtones: “that I detest mine owne nature, and in my retired imagination cannot withhold my hands from violence on my selfe.”⁴⁸ Browne might suggest elsewhere that “every man is his owne Atropos” (2.4, p. 61), but he resisted offering himself as an example. His bouts with melancholy are not to be confused with a life-and-death struggle for the soul.

CRITICISM AND THE ANTICOMIC TRADITION

Browne's reluctance—or rather refusal—to dig too deeply into the dark corners of his heart has brought criticism that he bobbed only too easily on the surface of theology and resisted the self-consuming call of God. “Browne,” writes Stanley Fish, “does not say to us ‘awake, remember, change,’ but ‘take it easy, don't let it bother you, let it be,’” while from a slightly different perspective Joan Webber observes that “with Browne, one often has the sense that the tragic insight is at best willed and at worst a cliché.”⁴⁹ These are honest and, to an extent, appropriate responses to Religio, but as criticisms they also assume that there is something deeply suspicious about a work whose basic strategy is affirmative and comic rather than afflictive and potentially tragic. For Fish, Browne's amiability betrays a fundamental indifference to the cry of the soul; for Webber (and also for Fish), Browne's preoccupation with the artful depiction of the self amounts to an escapist aesthetic: “whatever kind of tragedy or comedy the world may be (stage of fools, devil's mockshow, hospital, dream, globe, or fable), it is not remediable.”⁵⁰

Browne would readily have agreed with the first part of Fish's criticism since he strongly resisted Puritan insistence on the depravity of man, a vision that urged a tortuous investigation of the sinful self (“awake, remember”) and valued the conversion experience as the only authentic sign of election (“change”). “I can hardly thinke there was ever any scared into Heaven” (1.52, p. 49), he remarked with a deadpan innocence that quietly dismantles the rationale behind the hellfire and brimstone sermon. (Thomas Fuller tells us that the great Puritan divine, William Perkins, “would pronounce the word Damne with such an emphasis as left a doleful Echo in his auditours ears a good while after.”)⁵¹ “That name and compellation of little Flocke, doth not comfort but deject my devotion” (1.58, p. 53), Browne observed in distancing himself from the Puritan ideal of a spiritual elite, a brotherhood of Saints, either within or without the great wheel of the Church.⁵² And though he carefully distinguishes between his human and his Christian birth and admits not “esteeming my selfe any thing, before I was my Saviours” (1.45, p. 42), he does not translate this theological recognition into a formal principle: the spiraling meditations of Religio, separated into discrete sections, militate against the sequential structuring of events basic to all conversion narratives. If Fish eyes Browne with suspicion for not saying “awake, remember, change,” Browne was equally suspicious of the bullying designs that could lurk behind ardent declarations of faith: “Insolent zeales that doe decry good workes and rely onely upon faith,” he wrote, adding “onely” in 1643 to give more teeth to his criticism, “take not away merit: for depending upon the efficacy of their faith, they enforce the condition of God, and in a more sophisticall way doe seeme to challenge Heaven” (1.60, p. 54).

Remarks such as these would also suggest that Religio does not quite say “take it easy, don't let it bother you, let it be,” or that if it does, these amiable gestures do not constitute so much an attitude of indifference or escape as a defense of the via media. Taking it easy—enjoying one's self—is inseparable in Browne from both the proper devotional attitude and the proper church which allows for the fulfillment of this possibility. When he says that his “conversation … is like the Sunne's with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad” (2.10, p. 68), he defends his mode of comic discourse and deportment that, through the pun on “Sunne,” purports to be both humanistic and godly, natural and yet transcendental. Indeed, Browne's identification with a benevolent Christ is further reinforced by the underlying biblical echo, “But I say unto you which hear, ‘Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you’” (Luke 6:27). To reject this pattern of imitation in Religio is synonymous with rejecting “the common spirit that playes within us”; and though Browne is never so blunt or presumptuous as to say that this action alone merits damnation, he does suggest that playfulness—“a friendly aspect to good and bad”—is very much an expression of charity “without which Faith is a meer notion, and of no existence” (2.1, p. 55).

As for the failure of Religio to be remedial, this criticism depends, of course, very much on the diagnosis of the illness. If the times have become overwrought, then it makes perfectly good sense, as Anna Nardo has argued, to prescribe some playful recreation in which tensions can be released through the exuberant but innocuous “altitudos” of wit.⁵³ One can be a little zany without becoming a zealot. In fact, by allowing for a little zaniness, one might even take some of the insolence out of zeal. “There is not any of such a fugitive faith, such an unstable belief, as a Christian,” Browne reckoned (1.25, p. 25); and like Shakespeare ministering to infatuation, he sought to create an imaginative space—a “green world” of wit—in which instability could be celebrated, exhausted, and exorcised and “singular” minds readily reconciled to the great wheel of the church. Indeed, the rationale behind the addition of section 8 to the 1643 text emphasizes this point. Placed between the author's discussion of his heretical “greener studies” (1.6, p. 7) and his vertiginous exploration of the “wingy mysteries in Divinity” (1.9), this section simultaneously defends the via media as an acceptable place for the “singular” individual and underscores the exemplary nature of the author's subsequently eccentric but ultimately harmless exercise of faith: “for there is yet after all the decrees of counsells and the niceties of the Schooles, many things untouch'd, unimagin'd, wherein the libertie of an honest reason may play and expatiate with security and farre without the circle of an heresie” (p. 9).

To celebrate play, especially in 1643, was also the perfect strategy of a moderate, a way to use a buckler rather than a sword at a time when swords were being unsheathed. Playing seems antithetical to fighting, or to adopt Johan Huizinga's phrasing, it seems to lie “outside the reasonableness of practical life; has nothing to do with necessity or utility, duty or truth”;⁵⁴ and yet it is also difficult to escape the notion that Browne's additional emphasis upon “recreation” in 1643 was an act of resistance against an increasingly powerful Parliament that under pressure from strict “anti-theater Puritan leaders”⁵⁵ sought officially to outlaw all forms of playing. In response to Charles's having raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, it issued its famous order on 2 September to shut down the theaters: “whereas public Sports do not well agree with public Calamities; nor public Plays with the Seasons of Humiliation; this being an Exercise of sad and pious Solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Leachery: It is, therefore, thought fit and ordained by the Lords and Commons, & c. That while those sad Courses and set Times of Humiliations do continue, public Stage-Plays shall cease and be forborne.”⁵⁶ The injunction represented a triumphant moment for extremists like William Prynne, who had vehemently attacked the corrupting influence of the theaters in his voluminous Histriomastix (1633); and though the ordinance had no immediate liturgical bearing, it nonetheless gave, in its hostility to public sports, a signal about the fate of the bitterly disputed Book of Sports. Reissued by Laud in 1633 as a way to enforce conformity by insisting on the “lawful recreation” of games on Sundays, the book was burned by the hangman in 1643.

Playful and recreative, Religio Medici is hardly a closet version of The Book of Sports or a clandestine drama, but two lengthy passages attached to specifically recreative sections in Religio show that Browne was not going to subscribe to the new mood of imminent seriousness, or at least not in the way Parliament was legislating. The first of these additions occurs in part 1, section 13. Underscoring the general emphasis of part 1 on the first two cardinal virtues, faith and hope,⁵⁷ both early and revised versions begin with a declaration of worship: “That other attribute wherewith I recreate my devotion, is his wisedome, in which I am happy”; and in the portions added in 1643, Browne highlights, first through references to Solomon and then in an extended twenty-two-line poem with some closing commentary, the peaceful and solitary nature of his devotion. The additional portions do much to emphasize the nonviolent aspects of Browne's worship, as he recreates with obvious humility among the wonders of nature: “Teach me to soare aloft, yet ever so, / When neare the Sunne, to stoope againe below.” But they also show him wielding the buckler with a deftly defensive touch. Just when the speaker of the poem is about to evaporate from this world in his innocent “buzzing” of praises to God, Browne returns in the prose addition to remark: “And this is almost all wherein an humble creature may endeavour to requite, and someway to retribute unto his Creator.” “Almost all” is the key here. Browne sees the need for a few more words. Exchanging one book of God for another, nature for Scripture, he quotes Matthew 7:21 to the effect that not everyone who cries “Lord, Lord, Shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” The biblical allusion is deliberately modest, but it places the entire discussion of recreation within a scriptural frame that recollects, in a diminished key, the militant charge, “Beware of False Prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15). This is an accusation that Milton, for one, had already hurled at the corrupt clergy in “Lycidas” in 1637; with a reticence befitting his moderate stance, Browne turns it back on the zealous prophets (like Milton and Prynne) of the early 1640s. In his act of recreation, his pastoral pursuits, he quietly urges that the will of heaven is best served not by those who, prophesying in Christ's name, attempt to cast out the devils and do “many wonderful works” (7:22), but by those who, stooping before the sun (Son), leave the wonderful works to God.

The other major interpolation in the 1643 text involving recreation occurs in part 2, section 11. In many ways a summation or epitome of the comic spirit of Religio, the addition is thematically congruent with the emphasis in part 2 on the third cardinal virtue, charity, a virtue which, though appearing in Browne after faith and hope, nonetheless claims priority in order of theological importance since without it “Faith is a meer notion, and of no existence” (2.1, p. 55). Browne is reversing Calvin's preference here, and in doing so he gives a particularly Anglican reading of the decalogue;⁵⁸ but his presentation of a charitable disposition is also significantly different from Laudian attempts to use charity as a means to browbeat Puritans. Claiming to give a “moderate” answer to Henry Burton, Peter Heylyn, for instance, invokes “charity,” which “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itselfe unseemely,” as a justification for his notion of rigid conformity declared on the title page in the quotation from 1 Peter 13-14: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governers, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.”⁵⁹ Like Heylyn, Browne readily viewed the “flames of zeale” as a threat to charity, but his response to this perceived political conflict was not to insist that the zealous become charitable by submitting themselves to every ordinance of man but to urge that each person practice being charitable to himself: “how shall we expect charity towards others,” he queried, “when we are uncharitable to our selves?” (2.4, p. 61).

Browne, who remarks in 2.13 that he has “two armes too few to embrace [him] selfe,” heightened comic gestures like these into something like a comic principle in 1643 by extending and amplifying a statement about the self as a globe which he turns “round sometimes for my recreation” into a moment of rapturous self-worship:

The earth is a point not onely in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us: that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind: that surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot perswade me I have any; I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty, though the number of the Arke do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my minde: whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great. There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun. Nature tels me I am the Image of God as well as Scripture; he that understands not thus much, hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the Alphabet of man.

(2.11, p. 70)

The elaborate repetition of statement here, in which Browne keeps recreating from slightly different angles a transcendent, unlimited, divine version of himself, asks the reader to share in this pleasurable action, to experience momentarily the personal contentment that “wee call Happiness” (2,11), an experience in which through the stillness of syntax and idea we understand intensively the divinity behind the proverbial remark, “Charity begins at home” (2.4, p. 61). But if there is a rhapsodic element in this interpolation—one of the lines is included among those praised by the Norwich Quaker, Samuel Duncon⁶⁰—the passage also serves to objectify the self in something like a “scientific” manner. We study Browne studying himself where every angle of vision, each perspective, discovers the same essential truth: the happy recognition that “There is surely a peece of Divinity in us” (my italics). Browne's taxonomic approach thus circumvents Heylyn's “uncharitable” attempt to institutionalize charity through an act of political authority bearing the imprimatur of Laud, but his giddy playfulness also elegantly opposes the radical discontent of Puritanism. In Browne's “Alphabet of man,” there is finally no room for Prynne's extraordinary denunciation of mirth in Histriomastix in which he asserts that “Our Saviour, whose doctrine no Christian dares controll, hath denounced an woe to all those that laugh.”⁶¹ Browne's age in Religio Medici, a “miracle of thirty yeares,” recollects through Christ the prelapsarian Adam who, at age thirty, was thought to be “created in the perfect age and stature of man” (1.39, p. 38). Both the coincidence and the cause that made this recollection possible are surely reasons to smile.

Writing about generic contamination in Much Ado About Nothing, John Traugott has argued that “comedy is a fantasy of triumph, giving an access of superiority, as though somehow—by wit, accident, fortune, the god's intervention—we had mastered the perverse will of contingent life to sink down into the inert or fly into incoherent bits and pieces. This instant of mastery has no future, being what is right and therefore timeless.”⁶² Like so many politicized autobiographies of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Religio Medici is preeminently a fantasy of triumph, an exposition in which the self seems to have mastered the perverse will of contingent life once and for all; but the triumph and the comedy are also necessarily interior and personal, reckoned by the oblique angles of wit, wordplay, and paradox. Browne's God is the spirit that plays within, a figuration for the unexpected. He is not a deus ex machina, a god of history who will determine the shape of events to fit a predictable linear pattern and thus be the self-evident promoter of an elect nation. If Browne happily recorded the favor of Providence shining on England in “the victory of 88” (1.17, p. 17) when a Protestant country conquered the mighty Spanish Armada, he gives no sign, either within the text or in the preface, that England in the early 1640s retains its special status as a chosen nation “kindling her undazl'd eyes at the full midday beam.”⁶³

Browne's silence on this issue underlies, moreover, the embattled tone in the 1643 preface and helps to make acute the moment of mastery suggested by Religio itself. “Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end” is the troubling apocalyptic note sounded in the first line, cribbed from one of the more horrific moments in Seneca's Thyestes. Having learned of Atreus's mutilation of his nephews and of their being cannibalized by their father, the chorus in the play launches into a one-hundred-line description of cosmic chaos that concludes with the line, “Greedy indeed for life is he who would not die when the world is perishing.” Browne's recollection of Thyestes sets his work squarely in the disruptive, immediate historical context of England, as do the subsequent lines on the abusive powers of the press defaming the name of “his Majesty” and parliament. All are part of an author's elaborate protest for even bothering to emend a text at a time when there are more momentous things happening than the pirating of a physician's religion, a protest that Dr. Johnson, for one, found hard to take at face value. But whatever other reasons might underlie the stated one of desiring to repair something within one's power, it is impossible to erase altogether the survivalist impulse contained in the opening reference from Seneca: “Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end.” Written in a different key, the preface merges with the autobiography in identifying an author who resolutely refuses to lose his being.

Notes

1. Austin Warren, “The Style of Sir Thomas Browne,” Kenyon Review 13 (1951):675.

2. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (Durham, 1955), 439.

3. Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus (London, 1645), dedicatory epistle.

4. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, 1972), 367. Defending Browne against Fish's description of him as “The Bad Physician” has become something of a minor industry in Browne criticism. See, for instance, the measured rebuttal by Frank J. Warnke, “A Hook for Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish,” in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 49-59.

5. Strachey, “Sir Thomas Browne,” in Books and Characters, French & English (New York, 1922), 38. Like Strachey, Browne was notably skeptical of attempts to fix an absolute standard in taste: “For beauty is determined by opinion, and seems to have no essence that holds one notion with all” (PE [Pseudodoxia Epidemica], 6.11, p. 522).

6. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957), 265 (“Experience”).

7. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Browne,” in Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1977), 508.

8. James Joyce, Ulysses (1914; reprint, New York: Random House, 1961), 394.

9. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Brinkley, 414.

10. Edward G. E. Bulwer-Lytton, “Sir Thomas Browne's Works,” Edinburgh Review 64 (October 1836):31.

11. Johnson, “The Life of Sir Thomas Browne,” 508.

12. George Williamson, “The Purple of Urn Burial,” Modern Philology 62 (1964):115.

13. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 357.

14. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 15 vols. (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1860-64), 6:119.

15. See, Ted-Larry Pebworth, “Not Being, but Passing: Defining the Early English Essay,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10, no. 2 (Fall 1977):17-27. Like all students of Renaissance and seventeenth-century prose, I am indebted in the following discussion to the pioneering essays of Morris Croll, collected in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton, 1966) and R. F. Jones, reprinted in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951). Among recent general works devoted to historical study of seventeenth-century style, I have found especially useful Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), and Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “Seventeenth-Century English Prose Style: The Quest for a Natural Style,” Mosaic 6 (1973):107-44. Alvin Vos, “‘Good Matter and Good Utterance’: The Character of English Ciceronianism,” Studies in English Literature 19 (1979): 5-18, attends alertly to the caricature Bacon produced of Asham and the occasional simplifications it has inspired among later critics determined to see English Ciceronians as either empty of or unconcerned with content.

16. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (1932; reprint, New York: Random House, 1977), 32 (“Democritus Junior to the Reader”).

17. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, 210.

18. Adolph, Rise of Modern Prose Style, 152-56.

19. Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (London, 1661), 1-36.

20. Whitefoot, Posthumous Works, xxxii.

21. See, respectively, the present author's “Browne's Revisions of Religio Medici,” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985):145-63, and Finch's “Early Drafts of The Garden of Cyrus,” PMLA 55 (1940):742-47. Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne (Cambridge, 1962), 230-40, also has good things to say about the stylistic changes Browne made to Christian Morals.

22. See Frank Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne (Ann Arbor, 1962), chap. 12. Objecting to Huntley's hypothesis, N. J. Endicott (TLS, 15 September 1966, 868) has argued—to my mind unpersuasively—against Loveday as the subject and Pettus as the recipient. If important questions remain involving the occasion of the letter and the identity of the “friends,” Huntley's theory is still too well anchored in historical circumstance to be dismantled largely on the grounds of a problematic textual dispute. See also the letter by Karl Josef Holtgen (TLS, 20 October 1966, 966) and Huntley's response to both scholars (TLS, 9 February 1967, 116) as well as note 26 below.

23. Huntley, untitled review of The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman Endicott, in University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1968):408-15. See also, Frank Livingston Huntley, Essays in Persuasion on Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 114-25.

24. Walter Pater, “Sir Thomas Browne,” in Appreciations (London, 1922), 152-53. Symond's remarks on A Letter appear in the introduction to his edition of Religio Medici, Urn Burial, Christian Morals, and Other Essays (London: Walter Scott, 1886), xxiv.

25. N. J. Endicott, “Sir Thomas Browne's Letter to a Friend,” University of Toronto Quarterly 36 (1967):68-86; quotation is taken from p. 75.

26. Endicott's argument with Huntley involving the identity of the deceased (see note 22 above) depends largely on who the reader takes to be the subject (Scaliger or the patient) of the sentence beginning: “And this serious Person, tho no minor Wit, left the Poetry of his Epitaph unto others.” Endicott favors Scaliger on the basis of a sophisticated but dubious reading of the manuscript. (See Huntley's rejoinder noted above.) The matter cannot be settled on textual grounds alone, and if context as well as a belief in the integrity of The Letter means anything, it certainly points to the patient as being “this serious Person.” Browne is clearly talking at this point in the work about the patient's indifference to posterity, of which his refusal to pen his own epitaph serves as another instance. Moreover, despite his habits of amplification, Browne never altogether forgets the patient, who forms either the point of departure or return of all the author's thoughts. If the deceased is not the “serious Person” being referred to here, this paragraph becomes notable as the single exception to this practice and is the one obvious instance of an excrescence. Loose as it is, Browne's sense is clear; it might be roughly paraphrased: “as prolific as Scaliger was, he chose only five words for his epitaph; the victim, not of Scaliger's stature, though no minor wit, wrote none at all.”

27. Lamb's Criticism, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 68. The reference to Browne appears in “Mackery End in Hertfordshire.”

28. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Brinkley, 448.

29. See Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1958), chaps. 2-3, and Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Recent criticism on autobiography as a genre has become a major industry, but very little of it bears on writers of the seventeenth century. See, for instance, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and the bibliography included in it.

30. Anne Drury Hall, “Epistle, Meditation, and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici,” PMLA 94 (1979):234-46. Browne's debts to Montaigne have been a matter of curiosity ever since Thomas Keck's annotations to Religio in 1656, but no one has yet been able to speak with assurance about the Essaies as a “source” for Religio. See John Mulder, “Literary Scepticism: Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne,” Dissertation Abstracts 24 (1964):5389 (University of Michigan). The failure to locate a single “source” for Religio has, of course, not precluded scholarly attempts to record parallels and possible borrowings from other works, the most interesting of which is perhaps Allan Pritchard, “Wither's Motto and Browne's Religio Medici,” Philological Quarterly 40 (1961):302-07.

31. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:127.

32. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (Durham, 1955), 438.

33. Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison, 1968), chap. 6, esp. 154-56.

34. See A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout, “Thomas Browne and the Study of Anatomy at Leiden,” in Sir Thomas Browne M.D. and the Anatomy of Man, ed. J. A. van Dorsten (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 11-15. Browne's reference to “Fabrick” is presumably a reminiscence of Vesalius's anatomical work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric of the human body).

35. Leslie Stephen, “Sir Thomas Browne,” in Hours in a Library (London: John Murray, 1917), 268. A. C. Howell, “Sir Thomas Browne as Wit and Humorist,” Studies in Philology 42 (1945):564-77, surveys early responses to Browne's wit in their historical context and samples specific passages from the different works. See also C. A. Patrides, “‘The Best Part of Nothing’: Sir Thomas Browne and the Strategy of Indirection,” in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Patrides (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 31-48.

36. George Meredith, “An Essay on Comedy,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 49.

37. Quoted by Sypher, “The Meanings of Comedy,” in ibid., 196.

38. Hall, “Epistle,” 241.

39. The Works of the Learned Isaac Barrow, 3 vols, (London, 1686), 3:125, and Several Sermons Against Evil-Speaking (London, 1678), 80-81. Stuart M. Tave's The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3-15, identifies Barrow's pivotal role in the gradual secularization of “good nature” and “cheerfulness” as criteria for the proper mode of wit. It should also be mentioned that the subject of religious joy often became a vehicle for the repression of dissidents. In a sermon on 1 Thessalonians 5:16, the same passage that spurred Barrow to deny the lumpishness of faith, Donne, rather extraordinarily, interrupts his preaching to remind some in the congregation “to testifie their devotion by more outward reverence” unless they wished to be reprimanded by “our Officers” (The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-62], 10:222).

40. Owen Felltham, Resolves, A Duple Century (London, 1628), 43.

41. Horace, Satires, 1.4. 133-34. I am quoting from the translation by Smith Palmer Bovie, Satires and Epistles of Horace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

42. R. J. Schoeck, “O Altitudo! Sir Thomas Browne, Scriptures, and Renaissance Tradition,” English Language Notes 19 (1982):402-08.

43. Browne's place in the Renaissance revival of skepticism has been suggestively outlined by Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934; reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 40-46.

44. John Calvin, Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 399. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.2.23).

45. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 225-26.

46. Johnson, “Life of Browne,” in Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1977), 487-88.

47. Patrides, “‘The Best Part of Nothing,’” 33; Webber, Eloquent “I,” 181. On the issue of Browne's “merry-sadness,” it is worth quoting Walter Savage Landor, who is, in turn, quoted approvingly by Meredith: “Genuine humor and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one” (Comedy, ed. Sypher, 19).

48. The line is preserved in Jean-Jacques Denonain's edition of Religio Medici (Cambridge, 1953), 103 (RM, 2.7).

49. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeeth-Century Literature (Berkeley, 1972), 372; Webber, Eloquent “I,” 182.

50. Webber, Eloquent “I,” 183.

51. The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), xxxi-ii. It should be noted that in the authorized version Browne corrected the final line from “Thy will be done though in my owne damnation” (MSS, 1642) to “Thy will be done, though in my owne undoing.” The latter is not only less portentous but positively ambiguous if we think that in Religio the author has been “undoing” or revealing himself to the reader, a sense that is perfectly consonant with the essay format as described by Montaigne when he speaks in the preface to his Essaies of portraying “my selfe fully and naked.” “Damnation” is thus not only erased from the text, but the possibility of it has been considerably softened by the suggestion, necessarily oblique given Browne's distrust of zealous proclamations, that his writing has been directed by the hand of God.

52. Raymond B. Waddington, “The Two Tables in Religio Medici,” in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Patrides, 93-94. See also J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620-1670 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 171-234.

53. Anna K. Nardo, “Sir Thomas Browne: Sub Specie Ludi,” Centennial Review 21 (1977):311-20.

54. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1944; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 158.

55. Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 235. This quotation notwithstanding, Heinemann's study is valuable for dispelling the prejudice of earlier generations that Puritans across the board were opposed to theater.

56. Quoted from the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-), 2:4-5.

57. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, (Ann Arbor, 1962), 107-17.

58. Calvin, Selections from His Writings, 419-21. (Institutes, 3.2.41-42.) See also Waddington, “The Two Tables in Religio Medici,” 81-99.

59. Peter Heylyn, A Brief and Moderate Answer to the Seditious and Scandalous Challenges of Henry Burton (London, 1637), preface.

60. Works, ed. Wilkin, 1:352.

61. John Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1633), 294. Browne defends a “laughing” Jesus as a sign of Christ's humanity in PE, 7.26, p. 588.

62. John Traugott, “Creating a Rational Rinaldo: A Study in the Mixture of the Genres of Comedy and Romance in Much Ado About Nothing,” Genre 15 (1982):176.

63. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Wolfe, 2.558 (Areopagitica).

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

1. Collected Works

Sir Thomas Browne's Works. Edited by Simon Wilkin. 4 vols. London: William Pickering, 1835-36. Contains extensive biographical material, some critical commentary. Reprints Johnson's “Life of Browne” and Digby's “Observations” on Religio Medici.

The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. 2d ed. 4 vols. London: Faber & Faber, 1964. Brief prefaces, additional letters, and new material taken from manuscripts, but no critical commentary.

2. Selected Writings

Religio Medici and Other Works. Edited by L. C. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Other works include UB, GC, LF (plus manuscript version, Sloane 1862), and CM. Textual introduction, notes, critical commentary, index of authors cited. Reprints correspondence between Digby and Browne.

The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne. Edited by Norman Endicott. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Includes RM, UB, GC, LF, CM; selections from PE, Miscellany Tracts, notebooks (manuscript version of LF), and personal correspondences; chronology, introduction, textual and critical commentary, glossary, selected bibliography.

The Major Works. Edited by C. A. Patrides. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977. Besides containing printed works cited immediately above, it includes portions of PE. General introduction, critical commentary, dictionary of names, Browne's Latin translated, and Johnson's “Life of Browne” reprinted. An exemplary student edition.

3. Individual Works

Religio Medici. Edited by Jean-Jacques Denonain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. Introduction, extensive textual variants.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Edited by Robin Robbins. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. General introduction, text thoroughly glossed, subject and source index, illustrations.

Secondary Sources

1. Bibliographies

Donovan, Dennis G. “Recent Studies in Browne.” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972):271-79. A convenient, topically arranged, annotated bibliography of selected scholarship and criticism from 1945 to 1969.

Donovan, Dennis G., Herman, Margaretha G. Hartley, and Imbrie, Anne E. Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1981. Annotated entries of writings about Browne from 1643 to 1977. Listings especially thorough from the romantics onward. Includes brief overview of author's critical reputation. A substantial supplement to, but not a substitute for, Keynes.

Keynes, Geoffrey. A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Detailed publishing description and history of all of Browne's writings; biographical and critical remarks about Browne listed chronologically from 1633 to 1800; from 1801 to 1966 arranged alphabetically by author; forerunners and imitators noted.

2. General

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Sir Thomas Browne.” In Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley. Durham: Duke University Press, 1955. Marginal jottings and critical meditations on the man and his major works by one of Browne's great champions.

Croll, Morris W. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm. Edited by J. Max Patrick et al. Princton: Princeton University Press, 1966. At least two of Croll's studies from the 1920s reprinted here bear directly and importantly on Browne but ought to be read in the context of the forewords provided by John M. Wallace: “‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century” and “The Baroque Style in Prose.”

Endicott, N. J. “Sir Thomas Browne's Letter to a Friend.” University of Toronto Quarterly 36 (1967):68-86. A critically and biographically informed discussion of the Letter; essay branches out to address larger issues involving Browne's “humanism.”

Fish, Stanley E. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Browne is charged with being a “bad physician” for not involving “the reader” of Religio Medici in “the painful and exhausting process of self-examination and self-criticism.”

Hall, Anne Drury. “Epistle, Meditation, and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.” PMLA 94 (1979):234-46. Traces the work's generic affiliations to the anti-Ciceronian epistle and the religious meditation. Perhaps the best single study of RM.

Huntley, Frank L. Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962. Arguably the best full-length study of Browne: sympathetic to the wide range of ideas in his writings; biographical cruxes unraveled; detailed discussions of the individual works.

Johnson, Samuel. “Life of Browne.” In Christian Morals. London, 1756. Reprinted in several editions of Browne's works (see above). The first essential critical examination of Browne's life and works.

Pater, Walter. “Sir Thomas Browne.” In Appreciations. London: Macmillan & Co., 1922. Browne appears positively spectral in this memorable, fin-de-siècle assessment of his life and writings. Originally appeared in 1886.

Strachey, Lytton. “Sir Thomas Browne.” In Books and Characters, French and English. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1922. An appreciative defense of Browne's Latinate style; concentrates mostly on UB.

Warren, Austin. “The Style of Sir Thomas Browne.” Kenyon Review 13 (Autumn 1951):674-87. Still remains the best introduction to Browne's style, or styles, as Warren makes clear.

Webber, Joan. “Sir Thomas Browne: Art as Recreation.” In The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Analyzes the multitextured nature of self-revelation in “Anglican” Browne's Religio Medici.

Williamson, George, “The Purple of Urn Burial.” Modern Philology 62 (1964):110-17. Emphasizing the occasion of UB, Williamson seeks to define “the rational structure that actually informs its eloquence.”