hortatory as if they were worthy Nonconformists of real life crossing the fields from Elstow to Bedford. Bunyan, as compared with Milton, had no slight artistic advantage in the fact that his starting-point was a personal experience. What he beheld in vision he had known in a cruder form as a fragment of actual life. Perhaps it was also an advantage that, being unlearned in the culture of Greece and Rome, he drew no robe of Hellenism around his Hebraic ideas. The "Pilgrim's Progress" is derived from only one of the two antiquities; it is the prose-epic of English Hebraism.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

"ALL divinity," writes Donne in one of his poems, "is love or wonder." If we accept Donne's definition we must think of Sir Thomas Browne as among the greatest of English divines. Contemplative charity; illuminated wonder these were his possessions, or rather by these he was possessed. With nothing unsocial or inhospitable in his disposition, these made him in his best moments a solitary-Thomas Browne, "the only one." In an age of violence and strife, he moved serenely, or abode in the cloudy tabernacle of his own mind. In an age when religious ceremonial was strenuously enforced for the sake of uniformity, he valued ceremony-of diverse kinds-for its emotional or imaginative suggestions. In an age when dogma hardened into systems, and the sense of mystery departed, as all truth was made definite in schemes and plans dovetailed together from Scripture by the schoolmen of Protestantism, he gazed into what Bishop Berkeley described as the arcane part of divine wisdom, and amid the humblest circumstance of our daily lives he discovered something shadowy and arcane. While others were alarmed by the terrors of religion, he was rapt by its harmonies of beauty and of wonder.

In the affairs of state Browne's sympathies were

with the Royalist cause; in matters ecclesiastical he professed himself a loyal son of the English Church. Yet in truth he stands somewhat apart from the movements of his own day. Or if we are to connect him with any of the public interests of the seventeenth century, it must be with the research for scientific truth. The great scientific movement of the period which followed the Restoration was in the hands of a younger generation than that of Browne. His position was between the old view of the world and the new. The fabulous natural history, the popular folk-lore, the fictions of geographical speculation, the mediæval legends preserved in pictures, the strange Rabbinical interpretations of Scripture interested his imagination; they had the support of antiquity and of authority; they led him into a curious labyrinth; they made him, as he says, a wanderer in "the America and untravelled parts of truth"; and such wanderings in the virgin continent pleased him. He could indulge a scholarly scepticism without any apprehension that in exposing popular errors he was diminishing his territory of wonder. To explode a vulgar delusion was only to open an avenue for some finer apparition of the marvellous. His imaginative faith discovered under every roof of Norwich and in his own soul mysteries more moving than the legends of the basilisk, the phoenix, and the mandrake.

Apart from the confessions and betrayals of his mind, we can form some acquaintance with Browne and his surroundings. His life extended from 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot, to the year 1682, when

Monmouth made his popular progress and Shaftesbury retired to Holland. It was, amid all the national struggle, a scholar's life of tranquillity; when Fairfax advanced to Oxford, and the King quitted the city in disguise to place himself in the hands of the Scottish commissioners, Browne published his folio on Vulgar Errors; in the year of the Protector's death, when dangers threatened and the army plotted against his feeble successor, Browne was discoursing on the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk, and on the quincuncial plantations of the ancients. By birth a Londoner, he became an Oxford student, accompanied his stepfather to Ireland on a visitation of military defences, travelled in France and Italy, resided for a time at Montpellier and again at Padua, returned through Holland, and received his doctorate of medicine at Leyden. The "Religio Medici" was surreptitiously published when he was thirty-seven, and Browne became famous. At Norwich he practised medicine during upwards of forty years; in 1641 he married a lady of good family, and "of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband," writes his friend Whitefoot, "both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." With her he lived happily for forty-one years; she bore him twelve children, of whom four survived their parents. Browne was the friend of John Evelyn, Sir William Dugdale, and other distinguished persons whose interest in science or in antiquities drew them towards him. In 1671 he was knighted at Norwich by Charles II.

Eleven years later, after a short illness, he died on his seventy-seventh birthday.

Some minutes for Browne's life were set down at the request of his widow by his friend Whitefoot, the rector of Heigham. His complexion, and the hair, which fell curling upon his shoulders, were, says Whitefoot, "answerable to his name "; the hair was still auburn when in 1840 the coffin-lid was accidentally broken by the pick-axe of a workman in St Peter Mancroft. He was of moderate stature, neither meagre nor of disproportioned bulk. In dress he studied simplicity. He was by the habit of his mind introspective—“ a singular observer of everything that belonged to himself"; yet at the same time he loved to explore for curious knowledge all the visible universe and the world of books, eagerly observed the stars, had a most exact acquaintance with the geography of the globe, and was a student of plants and flowers. Evelyn visited Norwich on the occasion when Browne received the honour of knighthood; he found the physician's house and garden “a paradise and cabinet of rarities," chosen with good judgment, " especially medals, books, plants, and natural things." So Browne balanced his introspective tendency with the study of nature and the world of past generations of mankind; indeed his scrutiny of the world of his own mind, the microcosm within, was a kind of objective observation; he explored his spirit as a singular fragment of nature, finding there the choicest rarities to add to his collection. Except in the passion of contemplation, the soaring or sinking in his meditative rapture, he knew no great disturbances