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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    ingenious gentleman, but how deep a scholar” he will not presume to say, he insists on what modern criticism must constantly repeat, that it is the art, the style, the human charm of Browne that matter, and not his boasted learning. For his metaphysical arguments, Digby depends upon Thomas White, the Albius of Roman controversy, who was presently to push his own speculations into dangerous fields. It is odd that he reproves the personal note in Browne’s treatise, and those confidences about himself, and his tasks and habits, which we enjoy somuch. To Digby it seemed that these could ‘not much conduce to any man’s betterment” ; and he urged Browne to omit them from his treatises of philosophy, reserving them for that ‘notable romance of his own story and life” which he doubted not that Browne might “ profitably compose.” The Observations, however, although occa- sionally carping, are full of appreciative comment, and Sir Kenelm’s summing-up of “our physician,” as he calls Browne, is worth quoting :— “Truly I must needs pay him as a due the acknowledging his pious discourses to be excellent and pathetical ones, con- taining worthy motives, to incite one to virtue and to deter one from vice. .. . Assuredly he is owner of a solid head, and of a strong, generous heart. Where he employeth his thoughts upon such things as resort to no higher or more abstruse principles than such as occur in ordinary conversa- tion with the world, or in the common track of study and learning, I know no man would say better. But when he meeteth with such difficulties as concerning the resurrection of the body, . . . Ido not at all wonder he should tread a little away and go astray in the dark, for I conceive his course of life hath not permitted him to allow much time unto the unwinding of such entangled and abstracted subtilties. But,
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