Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 06
General
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 06
Literature -- Collections
[Footnote 2: These two distinguished authors were of congenial tastes,
and both cultivated the same Latinistic literary diction. Their meeting
must have occasioned a copious effusion of those "long-tailed words in
osity and ation" which both had so readily at command or made to order.
It is regrettable that Evelyn never completed a work entitled 'Elysium
Brittannicum' which he planned, and to which Browne contributed a
chapter 'Of Coronary Plants.' It would have taken rank with its author's
'Sylva' among English classics.]
A man of character so lofty and self-contained might be expected to
leave a life so long, honorable, and beneficent with becoming dignity.
Sir Thomas's last sickness, a brief but very painful one, was "endured
with exemplary patience founded upon the Christian philosophy," and
"with a meek, rational, and religious courage," much to the edification
of his friend Whitefoot. One may see even a kind of felicity in his
death, falling exactly on the completion of his seventy-seventh year.
He was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where his monument
still claims regard as chief among the _memorabilia_ of that noble
sanctuary[3].
[Footnote 3: In the course of repairs, "in August, 1840, his coffin was
broken open by a pickaxe; the bones were found in good preservation, the
fine auburn hair had not lost its freshness." It is painful to relate
that the cranium was removed and placed in the pathological museum of
the Norwich Hospital, labeled as "the gift of" some person (name not
recalled), whose own cranium is probably an object of interest solely to
its present proprietor. "Who knows the fate of his own bones? ... We
insult not over their ashes," says Sir Thomas. The curator of the museum
feels that he has a clever joke on the dead man, when with a grin he
points to a label bearing these words from the 'Hydriotaphia':--"To be
knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and
our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are
tragical abominations escaped in burning burials."]
At the first appearance of Browne's several publications, they attracted
that attention from the learned and thoughtful which they have ever
since retained. The 'Religio Medici' was soon translated into several
modern languages as well as into Latin, and became the subject of
curiously diverse criticism. The book received the distinction of a
place in the Roman 'Index Expurgatorius,' while from various points of
view its author was regarded as a Romanist, an atheist, a deist, a
pantheist, and as bearing the number 666 somewhere about him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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