n,
"is a small bee-like fly of an excellent fragrant odour, which I have
often found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips." Is this within
the experience of modern entomologists?

The Garden of Cyrus, though it ends indeed with a passage of wonderful
felicity, certainly emphasises (to say the least) the defects of
Browne's literary good qualities. His chimeric fancy carries him here
into a kind of frivolousness, as if he felt almost too safe with his
public, and were himself not quite serious, or dealing fairly with it;
and in a writer such as Browne levity must of necessity be a little
ponderous. Still, like one of those stiff gardens, half-way between
the medieval garden and the true "English" garden of Temple or Walpole,
actually to be seen in the background of some of the conventional
portraits of that day, the fantasies of this indescribable exposition
of the mysteries of the quincunx form part of the complete portrait of
Browne himself; and it is in connexion with it that, once or twice, the
quaintly delightful pen of Evelyn comes into the correspondence--in
connexion with the "hortulane pleasure." "Norwich," he writes to
Browne, "is a place, I understand, much addicted to the flowery part."
Professing himself a believer in the operation "of the air and genius
of gardens upon human spirits, towards virtue and sanctity," he is all
for [141] natural gardens as against "those which appear like gardens
of paste-board and march-pane, and smell more of paint than of flowers
and verdure." Browne is in communication also with Ashmole and
Dugdale, the famous antiquaries; to the latter of whom, who had written
a work on the history of the embanking of fens, he communicates the
discovery of certain coins, on a piece of ground "in the nature of an
island in the fens."

Far more interesting certainly than those curious scientific letters is
Browne's "domestic correspondence." Dobson, Charles the First's
"English Tintoret," would seem to have painted a life-sized picture of
Sir Thomas Browne and his family, after the manner of those big,
urbane, family groups, then coming into fashion with the Dutch Masters.
Of such a portrait nothing is now known. But in these old-fashioned,
affectionate letters, transmitted often, in those troublous times, with
so much difficulty, we have what is almost as graphic--a numerous
group, in which, although so many of Browne's children died young, he
was happy; with Dorothy Browne, occas