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fered his stomach to exhibit most rebellious symptoms, at mere sight of the dainty, though served up in plate of gold. "There was," says he, speaking of a repast, prepared expressly for his entertainment, -"there was but one article decidedly objectionable, a dish of crickets fried in sesamum oil." Here the uncatholic islander, one of the

"Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos,"

in tastes and habits, no less than in geographical position, peeped unequivocally forth. Wherefore should the cricket be objectionable? What ungentlemanly habits can be laid to his charge? Is he uglier, or less delicate than the hog or the eel? For my own part I esteem crickets as good eating as larks; and since we every day feed on worse things, think that, with Sir Thomas Browne, we should educate our stomachs to digest everything.

Still

To return granting, the critic might say, that he had the nerves of a vulture, and a stomach to match, there is a third cause of " low spirits" yet to to be enumerated, which possibly operated upon him-he may have been troubled with ungovernable passions, and indulged them to excess. our conjectures differ toto cælo from the truth. His temperament came not within that category. On the contrary, the philosopher himself boasts, or complains, for we may understand him either way," of the coolness of his blood at the summer solstice of his age."

--

With respect to the indifference about an epitaph, I can by no means comprehend the objection

of Digby. The critic, at this stage of the business, appears to have grown exceedingly capricious and hard to please; since it was but carrying one step further his contempt of death, which, nevertheless, finds great favour in the eyes of our courtly and ingenious observer. "I must needs acknowledge,"

he says, "that where he balanceth life and death against one another, and considereth that the latter is to be a kind of nothing for a moment, to become a pure spirit within one instant; and what followeth of this strong thought, is extreme handsomely said; and argueth very gallant and generous resolutions in him."

But if we take this unearthly view of the matter,— and I admire those who can,-why should not his stoical disdain of fame, (affectation, perhaps, no less than the other,) equally command our admiration ? The epitaph, in itself, is nothing. Few live long in the memory of mankind through those "sepulchral lies," or truths, which are engraved upon their tombs. He would express, by this place, his readiness to encounter total oblivion, to be blotted out from all human registers, to leave behind him upon earth no more trace than the cloud which swept turbulently during the celebration of his obsequies through the sky.

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And is not this every way as gallant and generous a resolution" as his indifference in the matter of life and death? Perhaps, if our thoughts were sifted to the bottom, it might be found that many of us scarcely care to live at all, except for the purpose of writing our names ineffaceably on

the history of the world. Our whole lives are devoted to the erection of our own cenotaph. It is not existence par se that we covet. That, though a pleasure, is not pleasure enough. The leading desire in all noble minds, is to form one of that imperishable band, who, for their genius or their virtue, have by the gratitude of their fellow-men been converted into a kind of heir-loom, which humanity will transmit, with delight and pride, from age to age for ever. Now, voluntarily to relinquish the hope to be numbered with these, I hold to be a still greater effort of self-denial, than "to bid farewell to the sun, and sleep till the resurrection :" and no less than this is implied, how truly I will not say, in Sir Thomas Browne's affirmation, that, provided his deeds were approved elsewhere, he cared not if his advent upon earth were not commemorated even so much as by an epitaph.

In the passage which follows immediately on the heels of the above, we detect undoubted traces of a low and vulgar way of thinking. "Would it not be thought," inquires Sir Kenelm Digby," that he hath a special good opinion of himself (and indeed he hath reason) when he maketh such great princes the land-marks in the chronology of himself?" To a "gentleman of the bed-chamber" every prince seems great, perhaps; but there are others who frame to themselves very different conceptions of human greatness. Mr. Walter Savage Landor has somewhere, in his "Imaginary Conversations," (too excellent to please generally,) a remark which I would place in juxta-position with Digby's. With

the confidence characteristic of the class he describes, Mr. Landor observes, that to be numbered among great writers, is to share a nobler destiny, to wield a more potent sceptre, than ever yet belonged

"To King or Kaisar;"

and, in a note, subjoins Plutarch's kindred remark, that "Juba was fortunate in having been taken prisoner by the Romans, which procured him the advantages of a liberal education, and the honour to be numbered, barbarian as he was, among celebrated writers."

I take this to be an answer to Sir Kenelm's courtier-like remark. If not, it may be added that history must be unworthy of the slightest credit if, in every quality which goes to the making up of true greatness,-learning, genius, virtue, Sir Thomas Browne was not very much superior to any of the "popes, emperors, kings, or grand seigniors," whom he saw descend into their graves. For, among philosophers, the sitting upon velvet cushions, and wearing a golden hoop on the brow, do not constitute greatness. They require a mind from which every trace of sordid selfishness has been obliterated, which converses habitually with the good and the beautiful, which loves whatever is noble, scorns whatever is base; and to them it matters not at all whether the man in whom these qualifications are found happen to stand at the head or the foot of the artificial ladder of society. They at once pronounce him great, and conceive that he does

princes an honour when he condescends to mark the chronology of his thoughts by the movements they make on their gilded stools, or the events by which they are removed from them.

But I have not yet considered or enumerated all the objections made by Digby to the confessions of Sir Thomas Browne. Having delivered himself of the above, he condescends to adopt the tone long since fashionable among reviewers, and says"Surely, if he were to write by retail the particulars of his own story and life, it would be a notable romance, since he telleth us, in one total sum, it is a continued miracle of thirty years.". Now, did the critic, or did he not, understand the chastened and beautiful passage of the "Religio Medici," to which he so sarcastically alludes? The author, having solemnly contemplated the anatomical structure of his own frame-having viewed with earnest attention its curious, intricate, and delicate workmanship-at length, from a pious sense of human infirmity, and of how incessantly it stands in need of the Divine protection, concludes, that to keep so complicated a machine, during thirty years, in motion, can be regarded as nothing short of a perpetual miracle. A very similar reflection suggested itself, under like circumstances, to David's mind:

"Strange that a harp of thousand strings,
Should keep in tune so long!"

And yet few, perhaps, will on this account reproach the psalmist, or suppose him to have enter

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