deformity alike served the ends of the supreme Artist. Art itself is only the perfection of nature, and nature, everywhere significant of ideas, is no other than the art of God.

Seeking in all directions for a Divine presence, unsatisfied until he had found spirit interpenetrating the whole framework of things, and filling all the interstices of existence, Browne loved to trace out the meanders of Providence in what men misname fortune. When the faculties of man-intellect, passions, and the energies of faith-are justly poised, when each aids the others, it is not difficult to commune with the soul of things. When we are ourselves harmonical, we give a spontaneous response to the harmonies of the world. The essentials of a spiritual creed naturally evolve themselves from a spirit at one with itself, while many questions merely curious, or worthy of consideration, but of no vital import, may remain unanswered. In his highest moments Browne-anticipating Wordsworth's mood-seemed to commune with some universal soul of Nature, but, whether this were so in reality or not, he could not doubt that some common spirit, which no man can properly call his own, plays in and through everyone of us like the breeze in an Eolian harp: "Whoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this Spirit, though I feel his pulse, I dare not say he lives; for truly, without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic, nor any light though I dwell in the body of the sun."

This wonderful universe becomes yet more wonderful when we know that it is tenanted by noble invisible

D

guests tutelary angels of countries and provinces, guardian angels of man, woman, and child; while, on the other hand, evil spirits roam abroad by permission, infuse melancholy into susceptible minds, communicate secrets of unholy knowledge, delude the credulous as phantasms of the dead, and possess the unhappy bodies of witches. Truly, a world full of wonders, where the Genius of Middlesex may be superintending the crowd that flows morning and evening through the city, or a demon may be gazing at you through the eyes of some Rose Cullender or Amy Duny. Browne's imaginative wonder is free from perturbation; he could sooner pity the great fallen archangel than be terrified by his malice; God's affable ministers approach us with no waving of fiery swords or blast of doom, but rather on gentle wings and with "courteous revelations."

A great scale of creatures ascends and descends from the meanest worm to the loftiest of the cherubim; in this scale man has his place as a kind of amphibious being, existing partly in a material and partly even now in a superterrestrial sphere. Of death, therefore, Browne had no fear; are we not already half in the sanctuary of spirits? Only through a natural bashfulness, he thought with a certain remorse of the ignominy of the body after its great change. Not by the vulgar contemplation of cross bones and a skull is the true theory of death to be attained. He meditated rather on life than on that cloudy portal through which we pass from life to life. If he mused on heaven, no

1 The names of those unhappy women whom Sir T. Browne's evidence in 1664 helped to send to execution on a charge of witchcraft.

Apocalyptic dream came to him of emeralds, chrysolites, and streets of paven gold; he looked within to those highest moments when the boundless appetite of the spirit seems to be satisfied: "The soul of man may be in heaven anywhere, even within the limits of his proper body." Fixing his contemplations on such attainments and foretastes of joy, he had little regard for those terrors of hell which filled the imagination of so many of his contemporaries; gross fancies of corporal torture by fire did not afflict him; the hell which he sometimes seemed to discover lay, like heaven, within his own heart: "Lucifer keeps his court in my breast, Legion is revived in me." Such thoughts, however, were quickly encountered by thoughts of the abyss of God's mercies, and even judgments put on the countenance of mercies. He was not the master of his own destiny; that was provided for by a higher Power; his future had been all determined for him before the world was: "Thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain." And so, with a flight of the intellect and imagination towards eternity and the Divine will, Browne's confession of faith attains a resting-place, and settles there in a calm of wonder and of love.

III

The second part of the "Religio Medici" considers the grace of charity, without which faith is a mere notion. In a poem of Cardinal Newman's a warning is uttered against the easy dreams of an otiose ami

ability; true love has rigour at its heart; hatred and zeal and fear are its awful consorts and companions. In Browne's day zeal was not lacking in either of the contending religious parties; the zeal of Laud was encountered by the zeal of Laud's opponents; Browne distrusted the piety of fiery indignation against the alleged enemies of heaven: "no man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another." Which of us, indeed, truly knows himself? Perhaps, after all, a natural disinclination to unreasonable repugnances and aversions is favourable to the growth of that plant that springs from no mortal soil-divine charity. True charity is not a weak commiseration for our fellows; it is part of the energy of our love of God. But petty instincts of hostility to any fragments of God's world-to beast, or reptile or plant-do not predispose us to the reception of His highest grace. Browne has pleasure in thinking that he is not palisadoed with the sharp stakes of prejudice or bastioned in idiosyncrasy, but lies open to every diversity of enjoyment: "I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour, air, anything. I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander "—why should he, who chose rather to decipher these odd hieroglyphs of God?" at the sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them." If there was anything which raised his scorn, it was that disorganised rabble-no true people which

Burke afterwards named "the swinish multitude," a hydra-headed beast, humanity forfeiting through madness and impiety, its true prerogative; but his disdain was not a class-feeling, an aristocratic insolence towards those rude mechanicals, at whose mingled folly and shrewd sense Shakespeare smiled; he discovered his rabble among the gentry also, plebeian heads, however dignified by rank or birth. Differences of

opinion, difference of race or nationality he could hardly conceive of as alienating men from one another. There were but differences of degree in his universal charity; God, his country, his friends he embraced as his closest kin; and after them all those his fellows to whom he could render any human service.

At thirty years of age Browne had not yet felt that "natural magnetism" which afterwards drew him to Mistress Dorothy Mileham. The fascination of ideas had preserved him from the passion for any creature of flesh and blood. Not, indeed, that he who regarded a toad or salamander without hostility could be averse from that sweet sex"; rather he was naturally amorous of all that is beautiful. But the harmony which he saw in the marriage-union reached him, entered into him, became a part of himself in other delightful ways, and ways less cumbered with material interests; it ravished him in the organ tones and the voices of a church; "even that tavern-music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer." We may suppose that when Thomas Browne pleaded his