ot, and a serious statement as
grave as a Blue-book, should therefore keep clear of Sir Thomas Browne.
His most congenial readers are those who take a simple delight in
following out any quaint train of reflections, careless whether it may
culminate in a smile or a sigh, or in some thought in which the two
elements of the sad and the ludicrous are inextricably blended. Sir
Thomas, however, is in the 'Inquiry' content generally with bringing out
the strange curiosities of his museum, and does not care to draw any
explicit moral. The quaintness of the objects unearthed seems to be a
sufficient recompense for the labour of the search. Fortunately for his
design, he lived in the time when a poet might have spoken without
hyperbole of the 'fairy tales of science.' To us, who have to plod
through an arid waste of painful observation, and slow piecing together
of cautious inferences before reaching the promised land of wondrous
discoveries, the expression sometimes appears to be ironical. Does not
science, we may ask with a _prima facie_ resemblance of right, destroy
as much poetry as it generates? To him no such doubts could present
themselves, for fairyland was still a province of the empire of science.
Strange beings moved through the pages of natural history, which were
equally at home in the 'Arabian Nights' or in poetical apologues. The
griffin, the phoenix, and the dragon were not yet extinct; the
salamander still sported in flames; and the basilisk slew men at a
distance with his deadly glance. More commonplace animals indulged in
the habits which they had learnt in fables, and of which only some
feeble vestiges now remain in the eloquence of strolling showmen. The
elephant had no joints, and was caught by felling the tree against which
he rested his stiff limbs in sleep; the pelican pierced its breast for
the good of its young; ostriches were regularly painted with a horseshoe
in their bills, to indicate their ordinary diet; storks refused to live
except in republics and free states; the crowing of a cock put lions to
flight, and men were struck dumb in good sober earnest by the sight of a
wolf. The curiosity-hunter, in short, found his game still plentiful,
and, by a few excursions into Aristotle, Pliny, and other more recondite
authors, was able still to display a rich bag for the edification of his
readers. Sir Thomas Browne sets out on that quest with all imaginable
seriousness. He persuaded himself, and he has pers