hat though
there seldom can have been a follower who put more of his own in his
following, it may be pronounced with confidence, "no Browne, no Lamb," at
least in the forms in which we know the author of "Elia" best, and in which
all those who know him best, though they may love him always, love him
most. Yet Browne is not a very easy author to "sample." A few splendid
sustained passages, like the famous one in the _Urn-Burial_, are
universally known, but he is best in flashes. The following, from the
_Christian Morals_, is characteristic enough:--

"Punish not thyself with pleasure; glut not thy sense with
palative delights; nor revenge the contempt of temperance by the
penalty of satiety. Were there an age of delight or any pleasure
durable, who would not honour Volupia? but the race of delight is
short, and pleasures have mutable faces. The pleasures of one age
are not pleasures in another, and their lives fall short of our
own. Even in our sensual days the strength of delight is in its
seldomness or rarity, and sting in its satiety; mediocrity is its
life, and immoderacy its confusion. The luxurious emperors of old
inconsiderately satiated themselves with the dainties of sea and
land till, wearied through all varieties, their refections became
a study with them, and they were fain to feed by invention:
novices in true epicurism! which by mediocrity, paucity, quick
and healthful appetite, makes delights smartly acceptable;
whereby Epicurus himself found Jupiter's brain in a piece of
Cytheridian cheese, and the tongues of nightingales in a dish of
onions. Hereby healthful and temperate poverty hath the start of
nauseating luxury; unto whose clear and naked appetite every meal
is a feast, and in one single dish the first course of Metellus;
who are cheaply hungry, and never lose their hunger, or advantage
of a craving appetite, because obvious food contents it; while
Nero, half famish'd, could not feed upon a piece of bread, and,
lingering after his snowed water, hardly got down an ordinary cup
of _Calda_. By such circumscriptions of pleasure the contemned
philosophers reserved unto themselves the secret of delight,
which the Helluos of those days lost in their exorbitances. In
vain we study delight; it is at the command of every sober mind,
and in every sense born with us; but Nat