There were more resemblances between Sir Thomas Brown and the Doctor than Fluellen discovered between Henry of Monmouth and Alexander the Great. Both graduated in the same profession at the same university; and each settled as a practitioner in a provincial town. (Doncaster indeed was an inconsiderable place compared with Norwich; and Brown merely procured his degree at Leyden, which was not in his time, as it was in Daniel Dove's, the best school of physic in Europe.) Both too were Philosophers as well as Physicians, and both were alike speculative in their philosophy and devout. Both were learned men. Sir Thomas Brown might have said of himself with Herbert, I know the ways of learning; both the head And pipes that feed the press and make it run; What reason hath from nature borrowed, Or of itself, like a good housewife, spun In laws and policy: what the Stars conspire; What willing Nature speaks, what forced by fire; Both the old discoveries, and the new found seas: The stock and surplus, cause and history: All these stand open, or I have the keys. The Doctor could not have said this; he would rather have said, I am but one who do the world despise And would my thoughts to some perfection raise, A wisdom-lover, willing to be wise.[1] Yet he was as justly entitled to the appellation of a learned man by his multifarious knowledge, as he was far from pretending to it. There were many things of which he was ignorant, and contented to be ignorant, because the acquirement would not have been worth the cost. Brown would have taken with just confidence a seat at the Banquet of the Philosophers, whereas Dove would have thought himself hardly worthy to gather up the crumbs that fell from their table. [Footnote 1: LORD STIRLING.] A certain melancholy predominated as much in the constitution of Sir Thomas's mind, as in that of Charles the First, to whom his portrait bears so remarkable a resemblance; and a certain mirth entered as largely into the composition of the Doctor's, as it did into Charles the Second's, to whom in all moral respects no one could be more utterly unlike. The elements have seldom been so happily mixed as they were in the Philosopher of Norwich; he could not have been perfectly homogeneous if a particle of the quintelement had been superadded;—such an ingredient would have marred the harmony of his character: whereas the Philosopher of Doncaster would have been marred without a large portion of it.