s in Wood's 'Athenae
Oxonienses,' he gave in a letter to his friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest
words his birthplace and the places of his education, his admission as
"Socius Honorarius of the College of Physitians in London," the date of
his being knighted, and the titles of the four books or tracts which he
had printed; and ended with "Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be
published."

This account of himself, curter than many an epitaph, and scantier in
details than the requirements of a census-taker's blank, may serve, with
many other signs that one finds scattered among the pages of this
author, to show his rare modesty and effacement of his physical self. He
seems, like some other thoughtful and sensitive natures before and
since, averse or at least indifferent to being put on record as an
eating, digesting, sleeping, and clothes-wearing animal, of that species
of which his contemporary Sir Samuel Pepys stands as the classical
instance, and which the newspaper interviewer of our own day--that
"fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judgment"--has trained to the
most noxious degree of offensiveness.

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS BROWNE]

Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select
company--"fit audience though few"--who are students of the 'Religio
Medici' to a close intimacy with his highest mental processes and
conditions, his "separable accidents," affairs of assimilation and
secretion as one may say, were business between himself and his grocer
and tailor, his cook and his laundress.

The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 produced the
completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the literary remains
of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources--his own note-books,
domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions of contemporary writers
and the works of subsequent biographers--all that we are likely, this
side of Paradise, to know of this great scholar and admirable man.

The main facts of his life are as follows. He was born in the Parish of
St. Michael's Cheap, in London, on the 19th of October, 1605 (the year
of the Gunpowder Plot). His father, as is apologetically admitted by a
granddaughter, Mrs. Littleton, "was a tradesman, a mercer, though a
gentleman of a good family in Cheshire" (_generosa familia_, says Sir
Thomas's own epitaph). That he was the parent of his son's temperament,
a devout man with a leaning toward mysticism in religion, is shown by
t