takes a broad and psychologically an
essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in
its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle
treatise in diagnosis.

A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of all the
men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that
he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said.
He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of
Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose _Virginibus Puerisque_ is modelled on
his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His
eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his
speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep
thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray
fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the _Religio
Medici_, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the
inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but
not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow
the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain
poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise. Such
work could never maintain its hold on taste if it were not carefully
finished and constructed with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a
great writer, was a literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a
quaint and lovable egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his
delicately figured and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous
and trivial when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they
stand they are rich and melodious enough.

(4)

In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author
stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the
schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was
his "original," he has no connection--other than a general similarity of
purpose, moral and religious--with Spenser's followers. To the
fantastics he paid in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two
half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had no
turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of Jonson. In
everything he did he was himself and his own master; he devised his own
subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone and must be judged
alone.

No author, however, can ever escape f