Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse.

  • Edmund Gosse
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    61/232 page 49
    Like some Italian of the Renaissance, born two hundred years earlier, Browne seems intoxicated with the new- born sense of loveliness, and his style totters with ecstasy. We see his writing, too, in such passages of Religio Medici as this, in the comparative freshness of its early felicity, before the Latinisms had over- whelmed him. Here we have nothing to excuse, nothing to smile at or regret; all is sensuous and simple. A great part of the charm which successive genera- tions of readers have found in feligio Medici resides in the confidence with which the writer speaks of himself, especially towards the close of the Second Part. The man’s human sympathy, and his delicate comprehension of the limits of those distinctions which should make us the more interested in one another, and, as a fact, are so apt to lead to suspicion and dissension—these are the qualities, rare at all times and almost unique in the seventeenth century, which make this book stand alone among its fellows. Just as a bright and genial companion, talking sympa- thetically about himself, has the power to persuade his listener that their instincts and aspirations are identical, so all manner of different persons have seen their own characters reflected in Thomas Browne’s flattering mirror. It is difficult, for instance, to think of a man of reflective temper less like Browne than S. T. Coleridge was, yet Coleridge seems to have told Wordsworth that he had never read a book in which he found evidence of so close a similarity to his own make of mind as he found in Leligio Medici. Every one recognises, or believes that he recognises, the best parts of his moral and intellectual nature in Browne’s D
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