wildernesses of handsome groves.... Night,
which Pagan theology could make the daughter of chaos, affords no
advantage to the description of order; although no lower than that mass
can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they
end, and so shall they begin again; according to the admirer of order
and mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven. Although Somnus, in
Homer, be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in these
drowsy approaches of night. To keep our eyes open longer were but to
act with our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are
already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that
hour, which roused us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbering
thoughts at that hour, when sleep itself must end, and, as some
conjecture, all shall wake again?'

'Think you,' asks Coleridge, commenting upon this passage, 'that there
ever was such a reason given for going to bed at midnight, to wit, that
if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes?' In truth,
Sir Thomas finishes his most whimsical work whimsically enough. The
passage is a good specimen of the quaint and humorous eloquence in which
he most delights--snatching fine thought from sheer absurdities, and
putting the homeliest truth into a dress of amusing oddity. It may
remind us that it is time to touch upon those higher qualities, which
have led one of the acutest of recent critics[6] to call him 'our most
imaginative mind since Shakspeare.' Everywhere, indeed, his imaginative
writing is, if we may so speak, shot with his peculiar humour. It is
difficult to select any eloquent, passage which does not show this
characteristic interweaving of the two elements. Throw the light from
one side, and it shows nothing but quaint conceits; from the other, and
we have a rich glow of poetic colouring. His humour and his melancholy
are inextricably blended; and his melancholy itself is described to a
nicety in the words of Jaques:--'It is a melancholy of his own,
compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed,
the sundry contemplation of his travels, in which his often rumination
wraps him in a most humorous sadness.' That most marvellous Jaques,
indeed, is rather too much of a cynic, and shows none of the religious
sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne; but if they could have talked together
in the forest, poor Jaques would have excited a far closer sympathy than
he receives fro