with
his odd touch of humour, 'Men speak too popularly who place it in those
flaming mountains, which, to grosser apprehensions, represent hell. The
heart of men is the place the devils dwell in. I feel sometimes a hell
within myself; Lucifer keeps his courts in my breast; Legion is revived
in me. There was more than one hell in Magdalene, when there were seven
devils; for every devil is a hell unto himself; he holds enough of
torture in his own _ubi_, and needs not the misery of circumference to
afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or
introduction into hell hereafter.'

Sir Thomas's witticisms are like the grotesque carvings in a Gothic
cathedral. It is plain that in his mind they have not the slightest
tinge of conscious irreverence. They are simply his natural mode of
expression; forbid him to be humorous, and you might as well forbid him
to speak at all. If the severity of our modern taste is shocked at an
intermixture which seemed natural enough to his contemporaries, we may
find an unconscious apology in a singularly fine passage of the 'Religio
Medici.' Justifying his love of church music, he says, 'Even that vulgar
and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me
a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first
composer.' That power of extracting deep devotion from 'vulgar tavern
music' is the great secret of Browne's eloquence. It is not wonderful,
perhaps, that, with our associations, the performance seems of
questionable taste; and that some strains of tavern music mix
unpleasantly in the grander harmonies which they suggest. Few people
find their religious emotions stimulated by the performance of a nigger
melody, and they have some difficulty in keeping pace with a mind which
springs in happy unconsciousness, or rather in keen enjoyment, of the
contrast from the queer or commonplace to the most exalted objects of
human thought.

One other peculiarity shows itself chiefly in the last pages of the
'Religio Medici.' His worthy commentators have laboured to defend Sir
Thomas from the charge of vanity. He expatiates upon his own universal
charity; upon his inability to regard even vice as a fitting object for
satire; upon his warm affection to his friend, whom he already loves
better than himself, and whom yet in a few months he will regard with a
love which will make his present feelings seem indifference; upon his
absolute want of avarice or