=2. His Works.= Almost alone among his contemporaries, Browne seems to have been unaffected by the commotions of the time. His prose works, produced during some of the hottest years of civil contention, are tranquilly oblivious of unrest. His books are only five in number, are individually small in size, and are of great and almost uniform merit. _Religio Medici_ (1642), his confession of faith, is a curious mixture of credulity and skepticism; _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, or _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), shared the same mental inconsistency, resembles the work of Burton in its out-of-the-way learning; _Hydriotaphia or Erne Buriall_ (1658), commonly considered to be his masterpiece, contains reflections on human mortality induced by the discovery of some ancient funeral urns; _The Garden of Cyrus_ (1658) is a treatise on the quincunx. The last work, _Christian Morals_, was published after his death. =3. His Style.= As a philosopher Browne is either obscure and confusing, as in _Religio Medici_, or unoriginal and obvious, as in _Hydriotaphia_. His learning, though it is wide and accurate, is too far-fetched and strange to be of much practical use. But as a literary stylist he is very valuable indeed. He shows the ornate style of the time in its richest bloom. His diction is strongly Latinized, sometimes to the limit of obscurity; and he has the scholastic habit of introducing Latin tags and references. In this he resembles Burton; but in other respects he is far beyond the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. His sentences are carefully wrought and artistically combined into paragraphs; and, most important from the purely literary point of view, the diction has a richness of effect unknown among other English prose-writers. The rhythm is harmonious, and finishes with carefully attuned cadences. The prose is sometimes obscure, rarely vivacious, and hardly ever diverting; but the solemnity and beauty of it have given it an enduring fascination. A brief extract will illustrate some of its qualities: Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.