But the most impressive tribute to Browne is the collection of Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia, Mo., 1982), with fifteen countributions by Philip Brockbank, Marie Boas Hall, Frank L. Huntley, D. W. Jefferson, John R. Knott, Jr, J. R. Mulryne, Leonard Nathanson, Ted-Larry Pebworth, Balachandra Rajan, Robin Robbins, Murray Roston, Raymond B. Waddington, Frank J. Warnke, Michael Wilding, and the editor.
1. ‘Ce livre n’aurait pas besoin de tels écoliers. Personne n’était capable de traduire ce livre s’il n’avait l’esprit approchant de l’auteur, qui est gentil et éveillé. Le genre du premier auteur du livre vaut mieux que tous les commentaires, qui ne sont que la misérable pédanterie d’un jeune homme allemand qui pense être bien savant’ (letter of 19 June 1657; in Bibl. § 176).
2. ‘the learned Annotator-commentator hath parallel’d many passages with other of Mountaignes essayes, whereas to deale clearly, when I penned that peece I had never read 3 leaves of that Author & scarce any more ever since’ (K, III, 290).
3. If indeed he is the annotator of the edition of Christian Morals in that year. But it may well be that, while providing Browne’s Life (below, pp. 481 ff.), he also contributed most if not all of the notes to the text.
1. James Winny, ed., Religio Medici (Cambridge, 1963), p. xvii. For Browne’s claim, see below, p. 153. Abbreviations in the notes are expanded on p. 537; references in parentheses involving numbers preceded by the symbol § (e.g. § 19, §127, etc.) are to the numbered entries in the bibliography, pp. 539–58.
2. St Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, VIII, 43; in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series (Oxford, 1899), IX, 150. See also the formulations by St Augustine and numerous Renaissance writers which I cite in ‘Paradise Lost and the Theory of Accommodation’, in Bright Essence (Salt Lake City, 1971), pp. 159–63.
3. James Russell Lowell, Among my Books (Boston, 1870), pp. 152–3.
4. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver L. Dick, 3rd ed. (1958), p. xxviii, and The Poems of George Daniel, ed. A. B. Grosart (1878), I, 205; respectively.
5. Ernest A. Strathmann, ‘Elizabethan Meanings of “Atheism” ’, in his Sir Walter Ralegh (1951), Ch. III. See also D. C. Allen, ‘Atheism and Atheists in the Renaissance’, and P. H. Kocher, ‘The Physician as Atheist’, in their respective studies (§§1, 69).
6. Thomas Scott, The High-waies of God and the King (1623), p. 60. On Padua as ‘the intellectual capital of the world’, see especially Stoye (§114); cf. Castiglioni (§26).
7. As averred among others by Willey (§128). See also §242.
8. John R. Mulder (§84).
9. The City of God, VIII, 7; trans. John Healey, revised by R. V. G. Tasker (1945). See further Robert E. Cushman, ‘Faith and Reason in the Thought of St Augustine’, Church History, XIX (1950), 271–94.
10. The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C. A. Patrides (1969), p. 13. The Plotinus extract is from his Enneads, VI, ix, 10.
11. Samuel Ward, The Life of Faith, 3rd ed. (1622), p. 2. See further Lovejoy (§77) as well as my extended article on ‘Hierarchy and Order’ (§94).
12. Quoted from the legendary Hermes Trismegistus (discussed later) in Christian Morals, below, p. 450. On the circle in Browne, see especially Huntley (§99), and in seventeenth-century literature: Nicolson (§86). On its wider manifestations – e.g. in architecture – consult the circular patterns of Bramante’s Tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio, discussed and illustrated by Paolo Portoghesi, Rome of the Renaissance, trans. Pearl Sanders (1972), pp. 53 ff., and plates 17–20. The metaphoric import of music is delineated by John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, 1961).
13. The quotation is from Browne’s Commonplace Book (in K, III, 293). On the 1664 trial, and on Browne’s views generally, see the bibliography (§§ 88, 187, 190; also Letts and Tyler, below, p. 547).
14. This tradition-bound view is expounded in my study (§ 93) to which I am much indebted here.
15. Psychozoia, I, 4; in his Philosophical Poems, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Manchester, 1931), p. 2. Ficino’s formulation reads: ‘Prisca Gentilium Theologia, in qua Zoroaster, Mercurius, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras consenserunt, tota in Platonis nostri uoluminibus continetur’ (De christiana religione, Ch. XXII; in his Opera [Basle, 1576], p. 25). On the entire tradition see also the bibliography (§§72, 98, 107, 111, 123).
16. Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will (1675), p. 49.
17. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, i.e. ‘that coincidence where later is one with earlier, where the end is one with the beginning, where Alpha and Omega are the same’ (De visione Dei, X; trans. E. G. Salter, 1960).
18. The present edition reprints extracts from the 2nd edition of 1650 but includes also a chapter which Browne added in the 3rd edition of 1658 (below, pp. 216–20).
19. Miscellany Tracts, 1683 (in K, III, 1–120). These include inter alia discourses on falconry, oracular utterances and prophecy, versification, geography, topography, and Of the Fishes eaten by our Saviour with his Disciples after his Resurrection from the Dead; also some botanical-philological-theological Observations upon Several Plants mentioned in Scripture, as well as a discourse on the uses Of Garlands (‘convivial, festival, sacrificial, nuptial, honorary, funebrial’).
20. The extant Catalogue of the Libraries of the Learned Sir Thomas Brown, and Dr Edward Brown, his Son (1710–11) includes Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Arcadia, Drayton’s Polyolbion, Jonson’s Works, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the poems of George Herbert, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (pp. 45 ff., 52 ff.). Continental poets are led by Virgil, Dante and Tasso. The total number of items in the catalogue is nearly 2,500; but one should add, I suppose, ‘some hundreds of Sermons’ which were among the works Browne’s daughter Elizabeth read to him in the evenings! (K, III, 331–2).
21. In Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613).
22. Merton (§206). Yost similarly speaks of Browne’s ‘intelligent acceptance of authority’ (§241).
23. Ralegh, The History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (1971), p. 72, and Dryden, ‘To my Honour’d Friend, Dr Charleton’, ll. 1–4; respectively. Aristotle’s designation derives from his birthplace Stagira in Northern Greece.
24. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book III, Ch. 28 (in K, II, 265). Browne with even greater enthusiasm wrote in a letter in 1646: ‘be sure you make yourself master of Dr Harvey’s piece De Circul. Sang. [i.e. Of the Circulation of the Blood]; which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus’ (K, IV, 255).
25. Select Discourses (1660), p. 48; cf. The Cambridge Platonists (as above, note 10), passim.
26. So Needham (§ 214); but his claim is disputed by Bodemer (§ 273).
27. Bacon’s influence on Browne, accepted by Howell and Thaler but especially by Chalmers (§§232, 275, 282), is denied by Merton (§206).
28. Evelyn (§329).
29. See Chalmers (§275).
30. Kepler is quoted from his Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Caspar (Munich, 1940), VI, 299; and Einstein, from Cecil J. Schneer, The Search for Order (1960), p. 368.
31. Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein (1973), Ch. XVI.
32. Seriatim: Symonds (§228); Lamb, as reported by Hazlitt, in the latter’s Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe (1933), XVII, 124; and De Quincey (§§185, 174). De Quincey is expressly commenting on the passage beginning ‘Now since these dead bones…’ (below, p. 306).
33. Peter Green (§193).
34. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. W.H. Gilman and A.R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), III, 219.
35. James M. Cline (§297).
36. Seriatim: Pater (§218), Coleridge (below, p. 537); and Dr Johnson (below, p. 494).
37. ‘Wie nun Gott der Schöpffer gespielet/ also hat er auch die Natur / als sein Ebenbildt lehren spielen / und zwar eben das Spiel / das er ihr vorgespielet’ (Tertius interveniens [Frankfurt, 1610], § 126; in Werke [as before, note 30], IV, 246, and in
W. Pauli, The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler, trans. Priscilla Silz in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche [1955], p. 172). The tradition is outlined by Hugo Rahner, Man at Play (1965); cf. Warnke on ‘Art as Play’ (§ 124).
38. The figure derives, we have been reminded, ‘from quinqueunciae or five-twelfths of a unit of weight of measure, and was used by the Romans to denote an arrangement of five trees in the form of a rectangle, four occupying the corners, one the centre, like the cinque-point on a die, so that a massing of quincunxes produces long rows of trees with the effect of lattice-work’ (§ 300: see also the diagram reproduced below, p. 323).
39. From Dee’s prefatory address to Sir Henry Billingsley’s translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570). Critics who espouse numerology have hesitated to enroll Browne in their ranks, aware that his laughter would undermine their efforts – witness the amusing reviews of their excesses by William Nelson in Renaissance News, XVIII (1965), 52–7, and Douglas Bush in ‘Calculus Racked Him’, in his Engaged and Disengaged (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 58–66.
40. Frank L. Huntley (§303). A similar problem is posed by Milton’s joint publication of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671) – now also solved, notably by Balachandra Rajan in The Prison and the Pinnacle (Toronto, 1973), pp. 82–100.
41. As I argue in the introduction to my edition of John Milton: Selected Prose (Penguin Books, 1974).
42. R.W. Ketton-Cremer, ‘Sir Thomas Browne Prescribes’, TLS, 2 November 1971 (p. 700)
43. Below, pp. 104, 159, 73, 134. Browne’s ‘doublets’ are fully discussed by Huntley and Warren (§§ 198, 234).
44. Κ, III, 4. While endorsing the general acceptance of the Bible’s influence on Browne, I cannot accept the large claims often made (e.g. by §§193, 216) about the influence of Dante. Suffice it that Browne was intimately acquainted with Dante, as he was with the Elizabethan dramatists led by Shakespeare (§§231–2). If a direct influence must be sought, I would much rather emphasize that of ‘le bon Rabelais’.
45. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G.R. Potter and E.M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1959), IV, 167. On Herbert’s response to the Bible, see my edition of The English Poems of George Herbert (Everyman’s University Library, 1974).
46. In Williamson (§171).
47. Bennett (§176) and Winny (as above, note 1); respectively.
48. Coleridge (below, p. 537).
49. Phelps (§ 219).
50. Dr Johnson sensed the point of contact instinctively, for his description of Browne’s style as ‘a mixture of heterogeneous words,… terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another’ (below, p. 508), is not unlike his remark in The Life of Cowley that in Donne and his heirs ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’.
51. Adolph (§137).
52. Huntley (§ 198). So, too, the ‘echo’ in A Letter to a Friend is the epistolary art of St Paul; in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, it is the concept of the Scale of Nature; and so on.
53. Howell and Bennett (§§ 254, 176); respectively.
54. Bennett (§176).
55. Apud John M. Shaw, Christian Doctrine (1953), p. 294.
56. See Matthiessen and Vande Kieft (§§335, 340).
57. As remarked in a letter by Evert A. Duyckinck, 18 March 1848; quoted by Davis (§ 327).
58. Cf. ‘Far back on the side of the head,… you will at last see a lash-less eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head… Moreover… the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectively divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts… This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes’ (Ch. 74).
59. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1956), p. 215.
1. i.e. printing. The ‘perversion’ alludes to the numerous anti-royalist pamphlets of the 1630s.
2. i.e. in UA (see headnote, above).
3. None of these related discourses survive.
4. Contrary.
5. Probably in Oxfordshire (§198) – not near Halifax in Yorkshire as often claimed.
6. ‘that speaks figuratively, or by tropes’ (Blount).
7. Below, p. 132.
8. Keck noted the eloquent proverb: ‘It is a common speech (but onely amongst the unlearned sort) Ubi tres medici, duo Athei’ – i.e. of every three physicians, two are atheists. But the charge was a wild exaggeration (cf. §69: Ch. XII, ‘The Physician as Atheist’).
9. Scientific.
10. Impartiality.
11. i.e. Protestant.
12. The Church Fathers of the first five centuries, especially St Augustine, were the guiding lights of the Reformation.
13. Luther was a miner’s son.
14. Mark 6.2–3 (‘From whence hath this man these things?… Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary…’ etc.).
15. ‘Resolvers’ (Coleridge). Browne’s adverse view of Roman Catholics is soon transformed into a tolerant attitude unique by any seventeenth-century standards.
16. Reproaches.
17. Corrected from: ‘I should loose mine arme rather then violate a church window, demolish an image, or deface’ (MSS.).
18. Memorial.
19. ‘A Church Bell that tolls every day at 6. and 12. of the Clocke, at the hearing whereof every one in what place soever either of house or street betakes him to his prayer, which is commonly directed to the Virgin’ (Browne marg.).
20. i.e. disapproving of.
21. The council at Trento in Northern Italy (1545–63), and the synod at Dordrecht in Holland (1618–19), determined the theological horizons of Catholicism and Calvinism respectively.
22. ‘In theire quarrells with Pope Paul the fifth’ (MSS. marg., in M) – i.e. when Venice was excommunicated in 1606 for repudiating papal authority.
23. i.e. satires. See below, p. 408, note 96.
24. Consistently used in a pejorative sense, suggesting a distrust of mere language (§260).
25. On Browne’s irenic disposition, see above, p. 24.
26. Who solved the riddle of the Sphinx.
27. ‘That looseth it selfe in Greece and riseth againe in Sicilie’ (MSS. marg., in M).
28. ‘transmigration of the soules of men’ (as below, p. 220). Cf. ‘transanimation’ (p. 467).
29. ‘A revolution of certaine thousand yeares when all things should returne unto their former estate and he be teaching againe in his schoole as when he delivered this opinion’ (Browne marg.). Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 39.
30. i.e. many cynics, and as many misanthropists.
31. The ‘error’ is mortalism, else psychopannychism; and widely disseminated as it was, obliged Calvin to write a treatise to refute it (1542). See §§18, 261, 272.
32. The second ‘error’ is known as apocatastasis (‘restoration’) – i.e. the eventual redemption of the damned inclusive of Satan. See §263.
33. Said by Jeremy Taylor in the seventeenth century to be ‘at worst but a wrong error upon the right side of charity’ (§343). Coleridge in annotating Browne observed: ‘Our church with her characteristic Christian Prudence does not enjoin Prayer for the Dead, but neither does she prohibit it. In its own nature it belongs to a private aspiration; and being conditional, like all religious acts not expressed in Scripture, and therefore not combinable with a perfect faith, it is something between prayer and wish – an act of natural piety sublimed by Christian Hope, that shares in the light and meets the diverging rays, of Faith, though it be not contained in the Focus’.
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