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.

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    about his first kind critic, and Edward, who attended Patin’s physic lectures, tells him that Patin ‘is very old, yet very pleasant in his discourse and hearty ; he is much followed [in Paris], is a Galenist, and doth often laugh at the chymists” ; after the lectures, ‘he answers all doubts and questions proposed.” In Sep- tember 1665, further courtesies having passed, we find Browne telling his son to ‘present my services and thanks unto Dr. Patin,” who lived on until 1672, dying full of honours and fame. The whole episode of his relations with Browne is one of great interest, the more as it was unparalleled at that time in the literary history of England and France. The spread of Browne’s fame over the continent of Europe was rapid. As early as 1649, a foreign correspondent was able to assure him that “a good part of Christendom” was now familiar with his character and work. For a century his name con- tinues to recur in the heavy German discussions about atheism and superstition, some writers claiming that Browne was a freethinker, others defending his ortho- doxy. Buddeus of Jena, drawing up a list of English atheists, put Sir Thomas Browne’s name into it, along with those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, and Toland ; while Tobias Wagner, a pillar of the German Church in his day, declared that Religio Medici could scarcely be read without danger of infection. All this was lumbering and ill-informed criticism, but it proves that the Norwich physician had achieved a foreign reputation denied to the rest of his contemporaries. When, in 1652, Levin Nicholas Moltke published his Annotations, he said that he had been first led to the perusal of Keligio Medici by its universal fame in
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