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PREFACE.

THE Hydriotaphia and Garden of Cyrus were published first as one small octavo volume, in 1658, the Epistles Dedicatory being dated May 1. Sir Thomas Browne was then in his fifty-third year, and had been settled for twenty-two years in practice as a physician at Norwich. In the Bibliography which follows, a full list is given of the various editions which have appeared of these two "Discourses," as their author called them.

The Hydriotaphia has taken its place as an English classic, unique in its subject, and full of charm in the way in which that subject is handled. The Garden of Cyrus is not so well known, and contains less of Sir Thomas Browne's characteristic writing, but the elaborate learning with which the curious question is pursued has not failed to attract the lovers of quaint and recondite lore. It is worth notice, that these treatises were written when Cromwell held the supreme power in England. But nothing has interfered with

their philosophic calm and old-world learning; there is not a hint, except in one gentle complaint against "this ill-judging age," from which the reader could infer that any unusual events had disturbed the country.

In the preparation of this edition, no great difficulty was experienced in settling the text, and such cruces as presented themselves in the Religio Medici were almost entirely absent. At the same time, there were certain variations in the texts of different early editions which required careful adjustment, and a considerable number of errors, not of any very great importance separately, which it has been the duty of an editor anxious to do full justice to his author to correct with care and with caution. It will not be without regret, that from the necessity of following Sir Thomas Browne's own directions, readers will see the words "gnawed out of our graves," in place of the much more poetic "knaved." In the Notes will be found a collation of all the editions published during the author's lifetime, and presumably subjected to his revision, with references also to later editions, by means of which the present settlement of the text has been arrived at. In the spelling and punctuation, it has not been thought desirable to follow the old editions, and both have been modernized freely.

A few words should be said as to the Notes. For

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the Hydriotaphia, these were compiled mainly by Dr. Greenhill, partly from the annotations of previous editors, his obligations to whom are carefully acknowledged, and partly they are his own. In the case of the Garden of Cyrus, it was Dr. Greenhill's opinion, that any attempt to collect a body of notes upon the zoological, botanical and antiquarian subjects discussed, would be a failure, owing to the difference between the scientific learning of the seventeenth century and of the nineteenth. Readers to whom the treatise would be interesting, might be trusted, he thought, to have sufficient previous knowledge to enable them to follow the author in his investigations. Therefore, a few explanatory notes only have been added, (and these, with two or three exceptions, not prepared by Dr. Greenhill), which are for the most part confined to giving references to some of the less obvious allusions in the text, and which attempt to do for the Garden of Cyrus in some degree what he did for the Hydriotaphia.

But the merit of the whole work belongs distinctly to Dr. Greenhill himself. He had been engaged upon it for some years; it was put aside from ill health and other causes, and was resumed, to be stopped suddenly, when very near completion, by his lamented death. No one knows better than the writer of these b

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