ture" (as much so as Guichard's curious old French book on
Divers Manners of Burial) and was the fruit of much labour, in the way
especially of industrious selection from remote and difficult writers;
there being then few or no handbooks, or anything like our modern
shortcuts to varied knowledge. Quite unaffectedly, a curious learning
saturates, with a kind of grey and aged colour most apt and congruous
with the subject-matter, all the thoughts that arise in him. His great
store of reading, so freely displayed, he uses almost as poetically as
Milton; like him, profiting often by the mere sonorous effect of some
heroic or ancient name, which he can adapt to that same sort of learned
sweetness of [157] cadence with which so many of his single sentences
are made to fall upon the ear.

Pope Gregory, that great religious poet, requested by certain eminent
persons to send them some of those relics he sought for so devoutly in
all the lurking-places of old Rome, took up, it is said, a portion of
common earth, and delivered it to the messengers; and, on their
expressing surprise at such a gift, pressed the earth together in his
hand, whereupon the sacred blood of the Martyrs was beheld flowing out
between his fingers. The veneration of relics became a part of
Christian (as some may think it a part of natural) religion. All over
Rome we may count how much devotion in fine art is owing to it; and,
through all ugliness or superstition, its intention still speaks
clearly to serious minds. The poor dead bones, ghastly and
forbidding:--we know what Shakespeare would have felt about
them.--"Beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a
man!" And it is with something of a similar feeling that Browne is
full, on the common and general ground of humanity; an awe-stricken
sympathy with those, whose bones "lie at the mercies of the living,"
strong enough to unite all his various chords of feeling into a single
strain of impressive and genuine poetry. His real interest is in what
may be called the curiosities of our common humanity. As another might
be moved at the sight of Alexander's bones, or Saint Edmund's, or Saint
Cecilia's, [158] so he is full of a fine poetical excitement at such
lowly relics as the earth hides almost everywhere beneath our feet.
But it is hardly fair to take our leave amid these grievous images of
so happy a writer as Sir Thomas Browne; so great a lover of the open
air, under which much of his