SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S CHRISTIAN MORALS.* Sin Tnosaes BROWNE seems, in
some respects, to have been the Buckle of his day, and though the parallelism should seem fanciful in some particulars, it may, perhaps, throw some light upon his position to say, that he bore in his century somewhat the same intellectual relation to his junior, the younger Bacon, that Buckle bears to his senior, the younger Mill. What Mr. Mill says
• Christian Morals. By Sir Thomas Browne, of Norwich, M.D., and author of " Magic Medici." The second edition, with a life of the author by Samuel Johnson, and explanatory notes. London : Blvingtons.
of Buckle, that he flung a book energetically into the crowd that set a vast number of men thinking upon problems which had been confined to a very few, is true of Sir Thomas Browne. His "Religio Medici" was no sooner published than, in the words of his biographer Johnson, " it excited the attention of the publick, by the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtlety of disquisition, and the strength of language." " There was no science.," Johnson adds, "in which he did not discover some skill ; and scarce any kind of knowledge, profane or sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he does not appear to have cultivated with success." The passage which follows might have been written by a modern critic upon Mr. Buckle himself. " His exuberance of knowledge and plenitude of ideas sometimes obstruct the tendency of his reasoning and the clearness of his decisions ; on whatever subject he employed his mind, there started up immediately so many images before him that lie lost one by grasping another. His memory supplied him with so many illustrations, parallel or dependent notions, that he was always starting into collateral considerations ; but the spirit and vigour of his pursuit always give delight, and the reader follows him, without reluctance, through his mazes." Finally, although Sir Thomas Browne now passes for a highly devout and religious man, he was ie his day accused of atheism, for which 'Comtism or Buckleism is now one of the mild expressions in vogue, but against the charge of which the great Samuel, no friend of infidelity, defends him with bitter though half-suppressed truculence.
Whether if Mr. Buckle had lived he would have left behind him a small manual of meditations to prove that whatever might be thought of his speculative opinions he was a Christian in spirit, we cannot say; but it requires little penetration to discover that whatever other motive Sir Thomas Browne may have had in writing his Christian morals, he constantly had his detractors in his eye. He speaks of " the purifying potion from the hand of sincere erudition" in the very first section. Again, he says, " show thy art in honesty," with an allusion to the opinion that men may be good men and dishonest thinkers. He rebukes the prevailing superstition concerning the mysterious virtues of a death-bed, and says weightily, " The sick man's sacrifice is a lame oblation." Some of his contemporaries, looking askance on his virtuous life, grudgingly observed " that the author was alive, and might grow worse as well as better." And, on the other hand, no doubt, others more weak, if more charitable, remarked, as such people seem to remark in every age concerning those with whom they disagree, and against whom they can find no better argument, that be would think better of it in the end. Truly, if after holding a faith in the maturity of our faculties we surrender it when our powers fail us, what is it but a lame oblation ? " Perseus lightly dipt," he says elsewhere, " not grain'd in honesty, are but pale in goodness, and faint-hued in integrity. But be thou what thou virtuously art, and let not the ocean wash away thy tincture." There is an exquisite poetry and depth in this remark ; it might almost be called the poetical axiom of individuality. Again, he says, with a fine under-current, " Moses broke the tables with- out breaking the law, but where charity is broke the law itself is shattered." In their general tendency Sir Thomas Browne's Christian morals lean mostly to the stoical side. He dwells repeatedly on the necessity of making virtue its own end, and on the corruption which ensues when good actions are performed for the sake of reward or the fear of punishment. One thing is plain, that in this his last and posthumous work there is no shadow of any retractation, but rather a running defence of the sincerity of his past life in the form of pious meditation.
But, on the whole, if we set aside the worth which these essays derive from the light they throw upon the mind of the author and upon his literary position, they are otherwise of little interest. There is in them no depth of systematic insight, nor, except in an occasionally happy simile or illustration amid the redundance of poetical imagery common to an age whose common thought was in metaphor, do they contain anything very much worth reading, while they abound in common-place. " Let not disappointment cause despondency," " Lead thine own captivity captive," " Trust not to the omnipotency of gold," " Be not beneficent for a name or cymbal," "Let not the law of thy country be the non ultra of thy honesty." At the same time, it must be borne in mind that all that is common-place in the present day, owing to the diffusion of knowledge, might not be common-place at a time when the vast body of civilized senti- ment contained in the classics was the exclusive privilege, not
of the nation, but of the caste of scholars, who daily built popular reputations for themselves by popularizing and trans- muting old classical thought into new household English coin. No doubt, too, the transfusion was accompanied by a process of fermentation due to the intellectual strife between the two languages and to the clash of the old and new tides of feeling. Thus, sentiments which in their old Latin or Greek dress were labelled, docketed, and laid aside by the scholar, pricked even his attention, when he saw them decked in the later coat of many colours of the younger tongue, and, as it were, blown out with the new, many-fangled Gothic and Romantic elements.
Curiously enough the most original and valuable essay in the book is one on physiognomy, in which Sir Thomas Browne anticipates many of Lavater's views. The editor, however, is pleased to call it without any qualification "a very fanciful and Indefensible section." Sir Thomas Browne thinks that men's faces may be reduced to a very few types, "if we exclude all visages which in any way participate of symmetries and schemes of look common unto -other animals." He goes on to say, "For as though man were the extract of the world, in whom all were in coagulate,' which in their forms were in solute' and at ex- tension [the shadowy anticipation of a Darwinian hypothesis], we often observe that men do most act those creatures whose con- stitution, parts, and complexion do most predominate in their mixtures. This is a corner-stone in physiognomy, and holds some truth, not only in particular persons but also in whole nations. There are, therefore, provincial faces, and national lips and noses, which testify not only the natives of those countries, but of those which have them elsewhere. Thus we may make England the whole earth, dividing it not only into Europe, Asia, Africa, but the particular regions thereof; and may in some latitude affirm that there are Egyptians, Scythians, Indians among us, who, though born in England, yet early the faces and air of those countries, and are also agreeable and correspondent unto their natures." This is certainly a very original passage in regard to physiognomy, and if it shows a penetrating quality of imagination, it is not on that account indefensible. One criticism upon it is, however, obvious, namely, that although a Hindoo type descended from English parents might very likely be associated with a Hindoo cast of mind, it does not follow that the difference of condition would not, out of the same material, produce a radically different character ; so that, in other words, the Indian Hindoo would be no criterion as to what Sir Thomas Browne would call " the English Hindoo." The German Jews never were like the Spanish Jews in character, and both were unlike the ancient Jews, in spite of the average persistency of the common physical type. With the exceptiOn of this essay on physiognomy, which seems unaccountably to have strayed from the scientific side of the author's mind into the heart of his ethics, there is, as we have said, nothing much to interest the general reader. We seem to hear in them a fine and learned old man, fond of hearing himself talk, and accustomed to be listened to with reverence, who has grown into the habit of thinking that no sentiment can poSsibly fall from his lips but ,must be welcome, useful, and important to the world at large, and by whom the early weight of responsible selection has long ceased to be felt.
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