V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician, is best known as the author of three prose works: _Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician_, 1642), _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), and _Hydriotaphia_ or _Urn Burial_ (1658). In imagination and poetic feeling, he has some kinship with the Elizabethans. He says in the _Religio Medici_:-- "Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable... Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas's shoulders... There is surely a piece of divinity in us--something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun." The _Religio Medici_, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die in." _Urn Burial_, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a prose poet of the "inevitable hour":-- "There is no antidote against the _opium_ of time... The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man... But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal luster, not omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature." Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ at the evening twilight hour. VI. _The Complete Angler_ of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is so filled with sweetness and calm delight in nature and life, that one does not wonder that the book has passed through about two hundred editions. It manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flowers. In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves:-- "But turn out of the way a little, good scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this shower falls so gently on the teeming earth, and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn these verdant meadows." [Illustration: IZAAK WALTON.] [Illustration: JEREMY TAYLOR.] VII. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called a seventeenth-century prose Shakespeare. Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ used to be read in almost every cottage. This passage shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to consider the final goal of youth and beauty:--