purse, or his soul with my prayers. These scenical and accidental differences between us cannot make me forget that common and untouched part of us both. There is, under these centos and miserable outsides, these mutilate and semi-bodies, a soul of the same alloy with our own, whose genealogy is God as well as ours, and in as fair a way to salvation as ourselves. Statists that labor to contrive a commonwealth without poverty, take away the object of charity, not understanding only the commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy of Christ.

Now there is another part of charity, which is the basis and pillar of this, and that is, the love of God, for whom we love our neighbour ; for this I think charity, to love God for himself, and our neighbour for God. All that is truly amiable is God, or, as it were, a divided piece of him, that retains a reflex or shadow of himself. Nor is it strange that we should place affection on that which is invisible. All that we truly love is thus. What we adore under affection of our senses, deserves not the honor of so pure a title. Thus we adore virtue, though to the eyes of sense she be invisible. Thus that part of our noble friends that we love is not that part that we embrace, but that insensible part that our arms cannot embrace. God being all goodness, can love nothing but himself and the traduction of his holy spirit. Let us call to assize the loves of our parents, the affections of our wives and children, and they are all dumb shows and dreams, without reality, truth, or constancy. For, first, there is a strong bond of affection between us and our parents; yet how easily dissolved. We betake ourselves to a woman, forget our mother in a wife, and the womb that bare us in that that shall bear our image. This woman blessing us with children, our affection leaves the level it held before, and sinks from our bed unto our issue and picture of posterity, where affection holds no steady mansion. They, growing up in years, desire our ends; or, applying themselves to a woman, take a lawful way to love another better than ourselves. Thus I perceive a man may be buried alive, and behold his grave in his own issue.

I conclude therefore and say, there is no happiness under (or, as Copernicus will have it, above) the sun, nor any "crambe" in that repeated verity and burthen of all the wisdom of Solomon, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit." There is no felicity in that the world adores. Aristotle, whilst he labors to refute the ideas of Plato, falls upon one himself; for his "summum bonum" is a chimera, and there is no such thing as his felicity. That wherein God himself is happy, the holy angels are happy, in whose defect the devils are unhappy, that dare I call happiness. Whatsoever conduceth unto this may, with an easy metaphor, deserve that name. Whatsoever else the world terms happiness is to me a story out of Pliny, a tale of Boccace or Malizspini, an apparition or neat delusion, wherein there is no more of happiness than the name. Bless me in this life with but peace of my conscience, command of my affections, the love of thyself and my dearest friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Cæsar. These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition, and all I dare call happiness on earth; wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand of providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdom of thy pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my own undoing.

HYDRIOTAPHIA.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

"I WONDER and admire his entireness in every subject that is before him. He follows it, he never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be the subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that treatise on some urns dug up in Norfolk, how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is ever line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh bone, now a skull, then a bit of a mouldered coffin, a fragment of an old tomb-stone with moss in its Hic Jacet,' a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind; and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or a gilt Anno Domini,' from a perished coffin-top."