ses somewhat more
than Jeremy Taylor, hardly at all more than Milton, though he does not,
like Milton, contrast and relieve his Latinisms by indulgence in vernacular
terms of the most idiomatic kind; and he is conspicuously free from the
great fault both of Milton and of Taylor--the clumsy conglomeration of
clauses which turns a sentence into a paragraph, and makes a badly ordered
paragraph of it after all. Browne's sentences, especially those of the
books regularly prepared for the press by him, are by no means long and are
usually very perspicuous, being separable in some cases into shorter
sentences by a mere mechanical repunctuation which, if tried on Taylor or
Milton, would make nonsense. To say that they are sometimes longer than
they should be, and often awkwardly co-ordinated, is merely to say that he
wrote when he wrote; but he by no means sins beyond his fellows. In regard
to Latinisms his case is not so good. He constantly uses such words as
"clarity" for "clearness," "ferity" for "fierceness" or "wildness," when
nothing is gained by the exotic form. Dr. Greenhill's useful glossary to
the _Religio_ and the _Morals_ exhibits in tabular form not merely such
terms as "abbreviatures," "aequilibriously," "bivious," "convincible,"
"exantlation," and hundreds of others with which there is no need to fill
the page, but also a number only less considerable of those far more
objectionable usages which take a word generally understood in one sense
(as, for instance, "equable," "gratitudes," and many others), and by
twisting or translation of its classical equivalents and etymons give it
some quite new sense in English. It is true that in some cases the usual
sense was not then firmly established, but Browne can hardly be acquitted
of wilfully preferring the obscurer.

Yet this hybrid and bizarre vocabulary is so admirably married to the
substance of the writing that no one of taste can find fault with it. For
Browne (to come to the third point mentioned above), though he never
descends or diverges--whichever word may be preferred--to the extravagant
and occasionally puerile conceits which even such writers as Fuller and
Glanville cannot resist, has a quaintness at least equal to theirs. In no
great writer is the unforeseen so constantly happening. Everyone who has
written on him has quoted the famous termination of the _Garden of Cyrus_,
where he determines that it is time to go to bed, because "to keep our eyes
open lon