How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as verse. "Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;" "When personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:"--such passages as these, and the whole of the 'Fragment on Mummies,' one can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce. That the 'Religio Medici' was the work of a gentleman before his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, "I have shaken hands with delight [_sc._ by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days." So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind. Its frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne's: if Montaigne had been graduated after a due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the _fluctus decumanus_ gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would have been closer. "The 'Religio Medici,'" says Coleridge, "is a fine portrait of a handsome man in his best clothes." There is truth in the criticism, and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden, that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?