Volume 1

The works of Sir Thomas Browne : including his unpublished correspondence, and a memoir / edited by Simon Wilkin.

  • Thomas Browne
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The works of Sir Thomas Browne : including his unpublished correspondence, and a memoir / edited by Simon Wilkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    51/612
    • superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting content- ment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than i our present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the t fruition of their own accomplishments. To his treatise on Urnburial was added the Garden i of Cyrus, or the Quincunxial Lozenge, or Network I Plantation of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered.8 This discourse he begins \with the Sacred Garden, in which the first man was : placed ; and deduces the practice of horticulture from the earliest accounts of antiquity to the time of the Persian Cyrus, the first man whom we actually know to have planted a Quincunx; which, however, our author is inclined to believe of longer date, and not only discovers it in the description of the hanging j gardens of Babylon, but seems willing to believe, and • to persuade his reader, that it was practised by the feeders on vegetables before the flood. Some of the most pleasing performances have been ; produced by learning and genius exercised upon sub- jects of little importance. It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to shew how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inade- quately of things really and. naturally great, is a task not only difficult but disagreeable ; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes by standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the 8 Mystically Considered.] He with- with apprehension and distrust, the Cu- stood the Copernican hypothesis—on vierian System of Geology—as opposing precisely the same ground on which some the statements of Scripture.—See vol. ii, • modern naturalists arc disposed to regard, p. and the Surplementary Memoir.