d deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting
ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;" "When personations
shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall
rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:"--such passages as
these, and the whole of the 'Fragment on Mummies,' one can scarcely
recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank
verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.

That the 'Religio Medici' was the work of a gentleman before his
thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active in a
calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties of
humanity, seems to justify his assertion, "I have shaken hands with
delight [_sc._ by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days."
So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its
morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and
sadder years that bring the philosophic mind. Its frank confessions and
calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne's:
if Montaigne had been graduated after a due education in Purgatory, or
if his pedigree had been remotely crossed with a St. Anthony and he had
lived to see the _fluctus decumanus_ gathering in the tide of
Puritanism, the likeness would have been closer.

"The 'Religio Medici,'" says Coleridge, "is a fine portrait of a
handsome man in his best clothes." There is truth in the criticism, and
if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who does not
feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden, that here is a
kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of the outside world,
that the handsome man is a true gentleman and a noble friend, and that
his best clothes are his every-day wear?

This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart "in the still air of
delightful studies," is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He
thinks his thoughts in his own way, and "the style is the man" never
more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions the
execution of Charles I. as a "horrid murther," and another speaks of
Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the public
eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultuous and
heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that Shakespeare was
of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton and George Herbert
and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the parallels i