wise, he seems to have gone about his professional duties, regardless outwardly at least—of state affairs. Besides, he was at this time busy with his confession of faith, Religio Medici, the first authorised edition of which appeared in 1643.

For a number of years Browne had been pondering over the strange ideas held by the majority of people on points of history,-natural, civil and religious-and so forth. This resulted in the publication (1646) of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed Truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors. In Vulgar Errors, as the work is usually styled, he begins by stating several causes of mistaken beliefs the infirmity of human nature, adherence to antiquity and to authority, and— what to Browne is the greatest promoter of false opinion -the father of lies, the Devil. Many of the beliefs belong to the unnatural natural history, the kind drawn upon for similes by John Lyly in his Euphues and frequently alluded to by Shakespeare. Some of the errors are: the salamander lives in fire; the chameleon lives on air; the ostrich digests iron; the phoenix exists; the peacock is ashamed of its legs; the stork is found only in a republic or a free state; the world was created in the month of March; a man weighs heavier dead than alive; the elephant has no joints in his legs.

Browne intended to write Vulgar Errors in Latin to appeal universally to scholars, but changed his mind in order to benefit the "ingenuous gentry" of England. But it is full of strange words of Latin origin and is by no means easy reading. It contains, however, much to interest and to amuse. Scientific truth, indeed, is not Browne's sole aim. It is the investigation he enjoys; and the more marvellous a tale is, the more enthusiastic is his discussion. In addition, he was himself in no small measure imbued with the contemporary credulity.

Browne's repute for multifarious learning brought him numerous letters from various quarters-even from

Iceland; and he was always ready to answer. He answered enquiries on the plants of the Bible; on the fishes eaten by Christ after the resurrection; on artificial hills and mounds; on languages and particularly the Saxon tongue; on Troas and the cities of the Dead Sea; on Apollo's oracle to Croesus; on whales stranded along the Norfolk coast. Besides his wide acquaintance with Latin and Greek writers-even the most out-of-the-way-he possessed a competent knowledge of the Bible in the original languages, with the commentaries thereon. Like Milton, he belonged to the select band of seventeenth-century Englishmen who read Dante's Divina Commedia in Italian. Other modern languages he also knew well. He was thoroughly versed in the Authorised Version of the Bible. But no other work in English-poetry or prosedoes he ever mention or allude to, with the one exception of Hudibras, and he merely recites a list of Greek and Latin burlesques which it called to his mind.

For a dozen years Browne published nothing; and then in 1658 came Hydriotaphia, with its elfin melody, meditations on cinerary urns recently unearthed in Norfolk. The same volume contained The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered. The quincunx is an arrangement of five objects, one in each corner of a rectangle and one in the middle—exactly what we see in the five of playing-cards. So were the trees in Cyrus's garden arranged. Browne ransacks heaven and earth, sea and land, and all that they contain, to discover similar forms. He finds them in St Andrew's Cross, in architecture, in crowns, in the beds of the ancients, in the Roman battle-array, in the labyrinth of Crete, in fruits and seeds, in skins of animals, and in scales of fishes.

Not long after the publication of this volume, Cromwell died, 3rd September; and Browne rejoiced in the collapse of the protectorate and the restoration of monarchy. When coronation day came, 23rd April, 1661, it was

with deep satisfaction that, in a private letter, he described the loyal doings in Norwich, part of which was the hanging and burning in effigy of Cromwell, "whose head," Browne adds, "is now upon Westminster Hall, together with Ireton's and Bradshaw's.”

Browne believed in the existence and the active malevolence of witches. In 1664 occurred an incident over which several of his biographers have waxed very angry: one of them calls it the most culpable and the most stupid action of his life." At the spring assizes, Bury St Edmunds, two women were accused of witchcraft. Sir Matthew Hale, the Lord Chief Baron, doubted the credibility of the evidence. Instead of directing the jury to acquit, he called upon Browne to give his judgment in the case. Browne declared "he was clearly of opinion that the fits were natural, but heightened by the Devil's co-operating with the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies." Eighteenth-century writers assert that Browne's authority influenced the jury in finding the women guilty. Now, if Hale was against conviction, he acted wrongly in calling upon another to speak, and one whose belief in witches-standing in print for over twenty years he himself must have known. Help in acquitting could hardly be expected from Browne. Hale seems to have wished to shirk responsibility. We are told he "put it off from himself as much as he could." In charging the jury, he expressed his own belief in the existence of witches, but refrained from insisting that the evidence was untrustworthy. Why should Browne be singled out for blame? He simply uttered what he sincerely believed, and his belief was that of the majority of contemporary lawyers, clergymen and philosophers. The jurymen of Bury St Edmunds hardly required Browne's authority to make them convict. At the assizes there in 1645-46 nearly fifty persons were condemned for witchcraft. New laws against witches had been passed in James I's reign; and from then to the end of Charles II's reign, some 70,000 victims are said to have suffered under these laws.

In judging Browne we must endeavour to look at matters with the eyes of Englishmen of 1664.

Four years later another find of urns was briefly chronicled in Brampton Urns, which was not published till 1712.

In September, 1671, King Charles visited Norwich, where he was feasted on the 29th in the New Hall, at a cost of £900. After the feast he was going to confer knighthood on the mayor, Thomas Thacker. The mayor modestly declined and begged his Majesty to bestow the honour upon their most distinguished townsman, meaning Dr Thomas Browne. Charles was graciously pleased to

consent.

About this time Browne composed two works, never finally revised by him, which were posthumously published: viz. A Letter to a Friend-a study of one of his cases-and Christian Morals. The first part of Christian Morals is an amplified version of the closing paragraphs of A Letter, while the rest gives admonitions and maxims on the conduct of life.

Browne died in 1682, on the 19th of October, his birthday—an instance of " a remarkable coincidence,' as he styled it in A Letter, when "the tail of the snake should return into its mouth precisely" upon the day of a man's nativity.

An old friend, the Rev. John Whitefoot, recorded his impressions of Browne. His complexion and hair answered to his name, even when he was over seventy years. He was of moderate stature, and neither fat nor lean. In dress he avoided finery and affected plainness. He was careful to keep warm. He rarely jested; and, as a rule, was not talkative. His memory was retentive, both for persons he had seen and for books he had read. He had great evenness of temperament, neither transported with mirth nor dejected with sadness. He was diligent in attendance at religious services.

We saw that, in the spring of 1661, Browne had spoken, not without satisfaction, of Cromwell's head cut from his dead body. Three years earlier he had, in Hydriotaphia,

expressed his horror of any interference with the dead; “to have,” as he phrased it, "our sculs made drinkingbowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragical abominations." He himself was to suffer one of these "abominations." In 1840 his coffin was accidentally broken into. The sexton carried off the skull, and sold it. Later it was placed in the pathological museum of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Now, in 1922, we are glad to chronicle its restoration to its first resting-place*.

"When the Funerall pyre was out," says "The Epistle Dedicatory" of Hydriotaphia, "and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations.

But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered."

II. HYDRIOTAPHIA: URNE-BURIAL

Browne had published nothing for twelve years when in 1658 Hydriotaphia appeared. A few months before in a field of Old Walsingham there were dug up between forty and fifty urns, which had been deposited in a dry and sandy soil, not a yard deep, nor far from one another (see pp. 9, 43). The contents comprised various human bones, with fresh marks of burning, pieces of boxes or combs, brazen nippers, and some sort of opal. Close by were found coals and "incinerated substances."

The effect on Browne was electrical. In "The Epistle Dedicatory" to Thomas Le Gros, he writes:

"We were hinted by the occasion, not catched the opportunity to write of old things, or intrude upon the Antiquary. We are coldly drawn unto discourses of Antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, or make out learned Novelties. But seeing they arose as they lay, almost in silence

* See Sir Arthur Keith's letter in The Times Literary Supplement, 11th May, 1922.