g on grain, and
wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly
the ear with music."

Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not
common until the first quarter of the next century.

V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician,
is best known as the author of three prose works: _Religio Medici
(Religion of a Physician_, 1642), _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), and
_Hydriotaphia_ or _Urn Burial_ (1658). In imagination and poetic
feeling, he has some kinship with the Elizabethans. He says in the
_Religio Medici_:--

"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate
were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common
ears like a fable... Men that look upon my outside, perusing only
my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above
Atlas's shoulders... There is surely a piece of divinity in
us--something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto
the sun."

The _Religio Medici_, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the
Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die
in."

_Urn Burial_, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a
prose poet of the "inevitable hour":--

"There is no antidote against the _opium_ of time... The greater
part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found
in the register of God, not in the record of man... But man is a
Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave,
solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal luster, not omitting
ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature."

Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words
derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and
often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ
at the evening twilight hour.

VI. _The Complete Angler_ of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is so filled
with sweetness and calm delight in nature and life, that one does not
wonder that the book has passed through about two hundred editions. It
manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flowers.
In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers
and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves:--

"But turn out of the way a little, good
scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle
hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this
shower falls so gently on the t