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Sir Thomas Browne was born in the heart of London in 1605, his father (of whom little is known except one or two anecdotes corresponding with the character of the son) having been a merchant of some property, and claiming descent from a good family in Cheshire. This father died when he was quite young, and Browne is said to have been cheated by his guardians; but he was evidently at all times of his life in easy circumstances, and seems to have had no complaint to make of his stepfather, Sir Thomas Dutton. This stepfather may at least possibly have been the hero of the duel with Sir Hatton Cheeke, which Mr. Carlyle has made famous. With him Browne visited Ireland, having previously been brought up at Winchester and at Broadgates Hall, which became, during his own residence, Pembroke College, at Oxford. Later he made the usual grand tour. Then he took medical degrees; practised it is said, though on no very precise evidence, both in Oxfordshire and Yorkshire; settled, why is not known, at Norwich; married in 1641 Dorothy Mileham, a lady of good family in his adopted county; was a steady Royalist through the troubles; acquired a great name for medical and scientific knowledge, though he was not a Fellow of the Royal Society; was knighted by Charles II. in 1662, and died in 1682. His first literary appearance had been made forty years earlier in a way very common in French literary history, but so uncommon in English as to have drawn from Johnson a rather unwontedly illiberal sneer. At a time unknown, but by his own account before his thirtieth year (therefore before 1635), Browne had written the Religio Medici. It was, according to the habit of the time, copied and handed about in MS. (there exist now five MS. copies showing remarkable differences with each other and the printed copies), and in 1642 it got into print. A copy was sent by Lord Dorset to the famous Sir Kenelm Digby, then under confinement for his opinions, and the husband of Venetia wrote certain not very forcible and not wholly complimentary remarks which, as Browne was informed, were at once put to press. A correspondence ensued, and Browne published an authorised copy, in which perhaps a little "economy" might be noticed. The book made an extraordinary impression, and was widely translated and commented on in foreign languages, though its vogue was purely due to its intrinsic merits, and not at all to the circumstances which enabled Milton (rather arrogantly and not with absolute truth) to boast that "Europe rang from side to side" with his defence of the execution of Charles I. Four years later, in 1646, Browne published his largest and in every sense most popular book, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiry into Vulgar Errors. Twelve more years passed before the greatest, from a literary point of view, of his works, the Hydriotaphia or Urn-Burial, – a magnificent descant on the vanity of human life, based on the discovery of certain cinerary urns in Norfolk, – appeared, in company with the quaint Garden of Cyrus, a half-learned, half-fanciful discussion of the mysteries of the quincunx and the number five. Nor did he publish anything more himself; but two collections of posthumous works were issued after his death, the most important item of which is the Christian Morals, and the total has been swelled since by extracts from his MSS., which at the death of his grandson and namesake in 1710 were sold by auction. Most fortunately they were nearly all bought by Sir Hans Sloane, and are to this day in the British Museum. Browne's good luck in this respect was completed by the devotion of his editor, Simon Wilkin, a Norwich bookseller of gentle blood and good education, who produced (1835) after twelve years' labour of love what Southey has justly called the best edited book in the English language. Not to mention other editions, the Religio Medici, which exhibits, owing to its history, an unusual variation of text, has been, together with the Christian Morals, separately edited with great minuteness by Dr. Greenhill. Nor is it unimportant to notice that Johnson, during his period of literary hack-work, also edited Sir Thomas Browne, and wrote what Wilkin's good taste has permitted to be still the standard text of his Life.

The work of this country doctor is, for personal savour, for strangeness, and for delight, one of the most notable things in English literature. It is not of extraordinary voluminousness, for though swollen in Wilkin's edition by abundant editorial matter, it fills but three of the well-known volumes of Bohn's series, and, printed by itself, it might not much exceed two ordinary library octavos; but in character and interest it yields to the work of no other English prose writer. It may be divided, from our point of view, into two unequal parts, the smaller of which is in truth of the greater interest. The Vulgar Errors, those of the smaller tracts which deal with subjects of natural history (as most of them do), many of the commonplace book entries, the greater part of the Garden of Cyrus, and most of the Letters, are mainly distinguished by an interest of matter constantly increased, it is true, by the display of the author's racy personality, and diversified here and there by passages also displaying his style to the full, but in general character not differing from the works of other curious writers in the delightful period which passed between the childish credulity of mediæval and classical physics and the arid analysis of the modern "scientist." Sir Thomas Browne was of a certain natural scepticism of temperament (a scepticism which, as displayed in relation to other matters in the Religio Medici, very unjustly brought upon him the reproach of religious unorthodoxy); he was a trained and indefatigable observer of facts, and he was by no means prepared to receive authority as final in any extra-religious matters. But he had a thoroughly literary, not to say poetical idiosyncrasy; he was both by nature and education disposed to seek for something more than that physical explanation which, as the greatest of all anti-supernatural philosophers has observed, merely pushes ignorance a little farther back; and he was possessed of an extraordinary fertility of imagination which made comment, analogy, and amplification both easy and delightful to him. He was, therefore, much more disposed – except in the face of absolutely conclusive evidence – to rationalise than to deny a vulgar error, to bring explanations and saving clauses to its aid, than to cut it adrift utterly. In this part of his work his distinguishing graces and peculiarities of style appear but sparingly and not eminently. In the other division, consisting of the Religio Medici, the Urn-Burial, the Christian Morals, and the Letter to a Friend, his strictly literary peculiarities, as being less hampered by the exposition of matter, have freer scope; and it must be recollected that these literary peculiarities, independently of their own interest, have been a main influence in determining the style of two of the most remarkable writers of English prose in the two centuries immediately succeeding Browne. It has been said that Johnson edited him somewhat early; and all the best authorities are in accord that the Johnsonian Latinisms, differently managed as they are, are in all probability due more to the following – if only to the unconscious following – of Browne than to anything else. The second instance is more indubitable still and more happy. It detracts nothing from the unique charm of "Elia," and it will be most clearly recognised by those who know "Elia" best, that Lamb constantly borrows from Browne, that the mould and shape of his most characteristic phrases is frequently suggested directly by Sir Thomas, and that 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 Nature, who teacheth us the rule of pleasure, instructeth also in the bounds thereof and where its line expireth. And therefore temperate minds, not pressing their pleasures until the sting appeareth, enjoy their contentations contentedly and without regret, and so escape the folly of excess, to be pleased unto displacency."

"Bring candid eyes unto the perusal of men's works, and let not Zoilism or detraction blast well-intended labours. He that endureth no faults in men's writings must only read his own, wherein for the most part all appeareth white. Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors, who notwithstanding, being judged by the capital matter, admit not of disparagement. I should unwillingly affirm that Cicero was but slightly versed in Homer, because in his work De Gloria he ascribed those verses unto Ajax which were delivered by Hector. What if Plautus, in the account of Hercules, mistaketh nativity for conception? Who would have mean thoughts of Apollinaris Sidonius, who seems to mistake the river Tigris for Euphrates; and, though a good historian and learned Bishop of Auvergne, had the misfortune to be out in the story of David, making mention of him when the ark was sent back by the Philistines upon a cart, which was before his time? Though I have no great opinion of Machiavel's learning, yet I shall not presently say that he was but a novice in Roman History, because he was mistaken in placing Commodus after the Emperor Severus. Capital truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateral lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from it."

Coleridge, as we have seen, charges Browne with corrupting the style of the great age. The charge is not just in regard to either of the two great faults which are urged against the style, strictly speaking; while it is hardly just in reference to a minor charge which is brought against what is not quite style, namely, the selection and treatment of the thought. The two charges first referred to are Latinising of vocabulary and disorderly syntax of sentence. In regard to the first, Browne Latinises 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," "æquilibriously," "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 longer were but to act our antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia." A fancy so whimsical as this, and yet so admirable in its whimsies, requires a style in accordance; and the very sentence quoted, though one of the plainest of Browne's, and showing clearly that he does not always abuse Latinising, would hardly be what it is without the word "antipodes." So again in the Christian Morals, "Be not stoically mistaken in the quality of sins, nor commutatively iniquitous in the valuation of transgressions." No expression so terse and yet so striking could dispense with the classicism and the catachresis of "stoically." And so it is everywhere with Browne. His manner is exactly proportioned to his matter; his exotic and unfamiliar vocabulary to the strangeness and novelty of his thoughts. He can never be really popular; but for the meditative reading of instructed persons he is perhaps the most delightful of English prosemen.

There are probably few English writers in regard to whom the judgment of critics, usually ranked as competent, has varied more than in regard to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. To some extent this is easily intelligible to any one who, with some equipment, reads any considerable quantity of his work; but it would be idle to pretend that the great stumbling-block of all criticism – the attention to matter rather than to form – has had nothing to do with it. Clarendon, at first not a very zealous Royalist, was the only man of decided literary genius who, with contemporary knowledge, wrote the history of the great debate between king and commonwealth. The effect of his history in deciding the question on the Royalist side was felt in England for more than a century; and since popular judgment has somewhat veered round to the other side, its chief exponents have found it necessary either to say as little as possible about Clarendon or to depreciate him. His interesting political history cannot be detailed here. Of a good Cheshire family, but not originally wealthy, he was educated as a lawyer, was early adopted into the "tribe of Ben," and was among the first to take advantage of the opening which the disputes between king and parliament gave to men of his birth, education, and gifts. At first he was a moderate opponent of the king's attempts to dispense with parliament; but the growing evidence that the House of Commons was seeking to increase its own constitutional power at the expense of the prerogative, and especially the anti-Church tendencies of the parliamentary leaders, converted him at first into a moderate and then into a strong Royalist. One of the chief of the king's constitutional advisers, he was after the Restoration the most distinguished by far of those Cavaliers who had parliamentary and constitutional experience; and with the title and office of Chancellor, he exercised a practical premiership during the first seven years of the Restoration. But ill-fortune, and it must be confessed some unwisdom, marked his government. He has been often and truly said to have been a statesman of Elizabeth, born three-quarters of a century too late. He was thought by the public to be arbitrary, a courtier, and even to some extent corrupt. He seemed to the king to be a tiresome formalist and censor, who was only scrupulous in resisting the royal will. So he was impeached; and, being compelled to quit the kingdom, spent the last seven years of his life in France. His great works, begun during his first exile and completed during his second, are the History of the Rebellion and his own Life, the former being by much the more important though the latter (divided into a "Life" and a "Continuation," the last of which starts from the Restoration) contains much interesting and important biographical and historical matter. The text of these works was conveyed by his heirs to the University of Oxford, and long remained an exception to the general rule of the terminableness of copyright.

Clarendon is a very striking example of the hackneyed remark, that in some cases at any rate men's merits are their own and their faults those of their time. His literary merits are, looked at by themselves, of nearly the highest kind. He is certainly the best English writer (and may challenge any foreigner without much fear of the result) in the great, difficult, and now almost lost art of character-(or, as it was called in his time, portrait-) drawing – that is to say, sketching in words the physical, moral, and mental, but especially the moral and mental, peculiarities of a given person. Not a few of these characters of his are among the well-known "beauties" justified in selection by the endorsement of half a dozen generations. They are all full of life; and even where it may be thought that prejudice has had something to do with the picture, still the subject lives, and is not a mere bundle of contradictory or even of superficially compatible characteristics. Secondly, Clarendon is at his best an incomparable narrator. Many of his battles, though related with apparent coolness, and without the slightest attempt to be picturesque, may rank as works of art with his portraits, just as the portraits and battle pieces of a great painter may rank together. The sober vivid touches, the little bits of what the French call reportage or mere reproduction of the actual words and deeds of the personages, the elaborate and carefully-concealed art of the composition, all deserve the highest praise. Here, for instance, is a fair average passage, showing Clarendon's masterly skill in summary narration and his equally masterly, though, as some hold, rather unscrupulous faculty of insinuating depreciation: —

"Since there will be often occasion to mention this gentleman, Sir Richard Granvil, in the ensuing discourse, and because many men believed that he was hardly dealt with in the next year, where all the proceedings will be set down at large, it will not be unfit in this place to say somewhat of him, and of the manner and merit of his entering into the king's service some months before the time we are now upon. He was of a very ancient and worthy family in Cornwall which had in several ages produced men of great courage, and very signal in their fidelity to and service of the crown; and was himself younger brother (though in his nature or humour not of kin to him) to the brave Sir Basil Granvil who so courageously lost his life at the battle of Lansdowne. Being a younger brother and a very young man, he went into the Low Countries to learn the profession of a soldier; to which he had devoted himself under the greatest general of that age, Prince Maurice, and in the regiment of my Lord Vere, who was general of all the English. In that service he was looked upon as a man of courage and a diligent officer, in the quality of a captain, to which he attained after four years' service. About this time, in the end of the reign of King James, the war broke out between England and Spain; and in the expedition to Cadiz this gentleman served as a major to a regiment of foot, and continued in the same command in the war that shortly after followed against France; and at the Isle of Rhé insinuated himself into the very good graces of the Duke of Buckingham, who was the general in that mission; and after the unfortunate retreat from thence was made colonel of a regiment with general approbation and as an officer that well deserved it.

"His credit increased every day with the duke: who, out of the generosity of his nature, as a most generous person he was, resolved to raise his fortune; towards the beginning of which, by his countenance and solicitation, he prevailed with a rich widow to marry him, who had been a lady of extraordinary beauty, which she had not yet outlived; and though she had no great dower by her husband, a younger brother of the Earl of Suffolk, yet she inherited a fair fortune of her own near Plymouth, and was besides very rich in a personal estate, and was looked upon as the richest marriage of the West. This lady, by the duke's credit, Sir Richard Granvil (for he was now made a knight and baronet) obtained, and was thereby possessed of a plentiful estate upon the borders of his own country, and where his own family had great credit and authority. The war being now at an end and he deprived of his great patron, [he] had nothing to depend upon but the fortune of his wife: which, though ample enough to have supported the expense a person of his quality ought to have made, was not large enough to satisfy his vanity and ambition, nor so great as he upon common reports had possessed himself by her. By being not enough pleased with her fortune he grew displeased with his wife, who, being a woman of a haughty and imperious nature and of a wit superior to his, quickly resented the disrespect she received from him and in no respect studied to make herself easy to him. After some years spent together in those domestic unsociable contestations, in which he possessed himself of all her estate as the sole master of it, without allowing her out of her own any competency for herself, and indulged to himself all those licenses in her own house which to women are most grievous, she found means to withdraw herself from him; and was with all kindness received into that family in which she had before been married and was always very much respected."

To superficial observers, or observers who have convinced themselves that high lights and bright colourings are of the essence of the art of the prose writer, Clarendon may seem tame and jejune. He is in reality just the contrary. His wood is tough enough and close-grained enough, but there is plenty of sap coursing through it. In yet a third respect, which is less closely connected with the purely formal aspect of style, Clarendon stands, if not pre-eminent, very high among historians. This is his union of acute penetration and vigorous grasp in the treatment of complicated events. It has been hinted that he seems to have somewhat lost grasp, if not penetration, after the Restoration. But at the time of his earlier participation in public affairs, and of his composition of the greater part of his historical writings, he was in the very vigour and prime of life; and though it may be that he was "a Janus of one face," and looked rather backward than forward, even then he was profoundly acquainted with the facts of English history, with the character of his countrymen, and with the relations of events as they happened. It may even be contended by those who care for might-have-beens, that but for the headlong revolt against Puritanism, which inspired the majority of the nation with a kind of carnival madness for many years after 1660, and the strange deficiency of statesmen of even moderately respectable character on both sides (except Clarendon himself, and the fairly upright though time-serving Temple, there is hardly a respectable man to be found on any side of politics for forty years), Clarendon's post-Restoration policy itself would not have been the failure that it was. But it is certain that on the events of his own middle age he looked with the keenest discernment, and with the widest comprehension.

Against these great merits must be set a treble portion of the great defect which, as we have said, vitiates all the English prose work of his time, the unconscious or wilful ignoring of the very fundamental principles of sentence-and paragraph-architecture. His mere syntax, in the most restricted sense of that word, is not very bad; he seldom indulges out of mere incuria in false concords or blunders over a relative. But he is the most offending soul alive at any time in English literature in one grave point. No one has put together, or, to adopt a more expressive phrase, heaped together such enormous paragraphs; no one has linked clause on clause, parenthesis on parenthesis, epexegesis on exegesis, in such a bewildering concatenation of inextricable entanglement. Sometimes, of course, the difficulty is more apparent than real, and by simply substituting full stops and capitals for his colons and conjunctions, one may, to some extent, simplify the chaos. But it is seldom that this is really effective: it never produces really well balanced sentences and really well constructed paragraphs; and there are constant instances in which it is not applicable at all. It is not that the jostling and confused relatives are as a rule grammatically wrong, like the common blunder of putting an "and which" where there is no previous "which" expressed or implied. They, simply, put as they are, bewilder and muddle the reader because the writer has not taken the trouble to break up his sentence into two or three. This is, of course, a very gross abuse, and except when the talents above noticed either fuse his style into something better, or by the interest they excite divert the attention of the reader, it constantly makes Clarendon anything but agreeable reading, and produces an impression of dryness and prolixity with which he is not quite justly chargeable. The plain truth is that, as has been said often before, and may have to be said more than once again, the sense of proportion and order in prose composition was not born. The famous example – the awful example – of Oliver Cromwell's speeches shows the worst-known instance of this; but the best writers of Cromwell's own generation – far better educated than he, professed men of letters after a fashion, and without the excuse of impromptu, or of the scurry of unnoted, speech – sometimes came not far behind him.

Against one great writer of the time, however, no such charge can be justly brought. Although much attention has recently been given to the philosophical opinions of Hobbes, since the unjust prejudice against his religious and political ideas wore away, and since the complete edition of his writings published at last in 1843 by Sir William Molesworth made him accessible, the extraordinary merits of his style have on the whole had rather less than justice done to them. He was in many ways a very singular person. Born at Malmesbury in the year of the Armada, he was educated at Oxford, and early in the seventeenth century was appointed tutor to the eldest son of Lord Hardwick, afterwards Earl of Devonshire. For full seventy years he was on and off in the service of the Cavendish family; but sometimes acted as tutor to others, and both in that capacity and for other reasons lived long abroad. In his earlier manhood he was much in the society of Bacon, Jonson, and the literary folk of the English capital; and later he was equally familiar with the society (rather scientific than literary) of Paris. In 1647 he was appointed mathematical tutor to the Prince of Wales; but his mathematics were not his most fortunate acquirement, and they involved him in long and acrimonious disputes with Wallis and others – disputes, it may be said, where Hobbes was quite wrong. The publication of his philosophical treatises, and especially of the Leviathan, brought him into very bad odour, not merely on political grounds (which, so long as the Commonwealth lasted, would not have been surprising), but for religious reasons; and during the last years of his life, and for long afterwards, "Hobbist" was, certainly with very little warrant from his writings, used as a kind of polite equivalent for atheist. He was pensioned after the Restoration, and the protection of the king and the Earl of Devonshire kept him scatheless, if ever there was any real danger. Hobbes, however, was a timid and very much self-centred person, always fancying that plots were being laid against him. He died at the great age of ninety-two.