ldhood: "His father used to open his breast when he was asleep, and
kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the
Holy Ghost would take possession there." It was perhaps because the son
inherited an aptitude for a like profound kindling of sentiment in the
taking of his life, that, uneventful as it was, [130] commonplace as it
seemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and so
stimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day. "What
influence," says Johnson again, "learning has had on its possessors may
be doubtful." Well! the influence of his great learning, of his
constant research on Browne, was its imaginative influence--that it
completed his outfit as a poetic visionary, stirring all the strange
"conceit" of his nature to its depths.

Browne himself dwells, in connexion with the first publication
(extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural
"inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as I have said, pass very
quietly through an exciting time. Born in the year of the Gunpowder
Plot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls
which, in an age alike of practical and mental confusion, can
anticipate and lay down the bases of reconstruction, like Bacon or
Hooker. His mind has much of the perplexity which was part of the
atmosphere of the time. Not that he is without his own definite
opinions on events. For him, Cromwell is a usurper, the death of
Charles an abominable murder. In spite of what is but an affectation,
perhaps, of the sceptical mood, he is a Churchman too; one of those who
entered fully into the Anglican position, so full of sympathy with
those ceremonies and observances [131] which "misguided zeal terms
superstition," that there were some Roman Catholics who thought that
nothing but custom and education kept him from their communion. At the
Restoration he rejoices to see the return of the comely Anglican order
in old episcopal Norwich, with its ancient churches; the antiquity, in
particular, of the English Church being, characteristically, one of the
things he most valued in it, vindicating it, when occasion came,
against the "unjust scandal" of those who made that Church a creation
of Henry the Eighth. As to Romanists--he makes no scruple to "enter
their churches in defect of ours." He cannot laugh at, but rather
pities, "the fruitless journeys of pilgrims--for there is something in
it of devotion."