The Major Works (English Library)
Page 62
7. ‘In the King’s Forests they set the Figure of a broad Arrow upon Trees that are to be cut down’ (Browne marg.).
8. In Epidemics, VI, vii, 9 (Browne marg.).
9. So Bellonius (Browne marg.).
10. The heart as first seen in embryos (M).
11. Striving.
12. See above, p. 386, note 55.
13. ‘Monstra contingunt in medicina. Hippoc. Strange and rare Escapes there happen sometimes in Physic’ (Browne marg.).
14. So Angelus Victorius (Browne marg.).
15. Matthew 4.23 (Browne marg.).
16. The Archidoxis magica (as above, p. 85, note 123).
17. ‘Aristotle adds that no animal dies except when the tide is ebbing. The observation has been often made on the ocean of Gaul; but it has only been found true with respect to man’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Pliny, II, ci, 220).
18. As in Hesiod, Theogony, 212.
19. ‘The hanging part of the ear is called the lobe. Not every ear has this part: those who are born at night do not have it, but those who are born in the day do, for the most part’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Scaliger’s commentary on Aristotle).
20. Accidental.
21. ‘fever’ (MSS.: M, K, E).
22. So Pliny, VII, 52
23. See above, p. 66, note 29.
24. See above, p. 99, note 188.
25. ‘According to the Egyptian Hieroglyphick’ (Browne marg.). Cf. Pierius: ‘The snake eats its own tail to show the immortality of its generations and to demonstrate that the beginning is turned to the end and the end turned back to the beginning’ (M). Browne himself was to die on his birthday, 19 October 1682.
26. So Knolles on the Duke John Ernestus (Browne marg.).
27. Satisfying meal.
28. In the Poet Dante his description’ (Browne marg.): Purgatorio, XXIII, 28. Cf. above, p. 296, note 89.
29. ‘he that telleth of thinges to come by lokynge in beastes bowelles’ (Elyot).
30. Taking out the entrails.
31. Carried by six (Juvenal, Satires, I, 64).
32. In his treatise Concerning the Diseases of Children, 15 77 (Browne marg.).
33. As above, p. 392, note 4.
34. ‘Morta, the Deity of Death or Fate’ (Browne marg.).
35. ‘When Mens Faces are drawn with resemblance to some other Animals, the Italians call it, to be drawn in Caricatura’ (Browne marg.).
36. i.e. retrogressively.
37. In his treatise Concerning the Use of the Human Beard (Browne marg.).
38. ‘The Life of a Man is Three-score and Ten’ (Browne marg.): Psalm 90.10.
39. The rare disease variously known as Les Crinons, Masclous, or Masquelons (for details see §317).
40. His upper and lower Jaw being solid, and without distinct rows of Teeth’ (Browne marg.): cf. Plutarch’s life of Pyrrhus, III.
41. According to Picotus, (Browne marg.).
42. ‘Twice tell over his Teeth never live to threescore Years’ (Browne marg.).
43. ‘many I have seen become’ (MSS.: K; E): ‘many have been become’ (1690 ed.: M).
44. In Les Voyages (1654).
45. When persons were touched for the King’s Evil [scrofula], a gold medal was hung round each patient’s neck (G1).
46. ‘Most carefree and easy’ (Browne marg., quoted in Greek and Latin): as remarked by Hippocrates, Epidemics, I, iii, 11.
47. ‘The bell rarely tolls for a fourth-day fever’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of a popular saying). The daily services were at the first, third, sixth and ninth hours.
48. In The Republic, III, 405d.
49. The membrane investing the intestines (M).
50. Sapless (as above, p. 299, note 14).
51. ‘So A.F.’ (Browne marg.). K reads ‘A.J.’, identified as Sir Arthur Jenny (K, III, 301).
52. Ribs.
53. ‘Cardan in his Encomium Podagræ [Praise of Gout] reckoneth this among the Dona Podagræ [Gifts of Gout], that they are delivered thereby from the Pthysis and Stone in the Bladder’ (Browne marg.).
54. In the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, X, 1.
55. i.e. writers on agriculture.
56. An error for Aldrovandi (M) ?
57. ‘belonging to Whales or such like great fishes’ (Blount).
58. ‘Birds, Beasts, or Fishes that breed eggs or spawn’ (Blount, citing Browne). Cf. above, p. 203.
59. In On Dreams (Browne marg.). The more ‘scientific’ attitude of Hippocrates is here contrasted to interpretations of dreams ventured by Artemidorus, whose Oneirocriticon is ‘mainly a source book of ancient superstition’ (§125).
60. ibid.
61. See below, p. 476, note 5.
62. Hippocrates claims that man declines most between his eighteenth and his thirty-fifth year (Aphorisms, V, 9).
63. Transmissions (cf. above, p. 106, note 224).
64. ‘A sound Child cut out of the Body of the Mother’ (Browne marg.).
65. ‘We take our children young to the river and harden them in the painful, ice-cold water’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Aeneid, IX, 603–4).
66. i.e. like those auction-sales where bids were received so long as a small candle still burned (G1; M).
67. ‘Julius Caesar Scaliger his remains’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin in Joseph Scaliger’s biography of his father).
68. i.e. Robert Loveday (see headnote, above, p. 389).
69. Cf. ‘Cicero, the worst of Poets’ (above, p. 150).
70. i.e. desipiency: ‘when the sick person speak and doth idly; dotage’ (Blount).
71. As above, p. 360, note 88.
72. ‘Felicities’: ‘real Felicities enough’ (MSS.: M).
73. ‘soften’: ‘sweeten’ (MSS.: M).
74. Co-existence.
75. ‘unto too uncomfortable’: ‘into to narrowe’ (MSS.: M).
76. Martial, Epigrams, X, xlvii, 13 (Browne marg., quoted in Latin).
77. ‘Who upon some Accounts, and Tradition, is said to have lived 30 Years after he was raised by our Saviour. Baronius’ (Browne marg.). Baronius had quoted the account of Epiphanius.
78. As above, p. 112, note 258.
79. ‘In the Speech of Vulteius in Lucan [IV, 486–7], animating his Souldiers in a great struggle to kill one another… [:] “All fear is over do but resolve to dye, and make your Desires meet Necessity” ’ (Browne marg.).
80. On the Stoic and Christian attitudes to death – and life – see also above, p. 304.
81. In Aemid, VIII, 209.
82. Especially In the Book of Revelation, whose ‘signs’ of the age preceding the Last Judgement were widely said to have been fulfilled by the seventeenth century.
83. Wisdom of Solomon 4.9 (Browne marg.).
84. i.e. old at sixty-three, one’s climacteric year (above, pp. 231 ff.).
85. ‘Deceitfull’ (Cockeram).
86. Nearly all the paragraphs from the next one to the end of the Letter (p. 414) reappear in Christian Morals (see below, pp. 417 ff.).
87. Rope-walking.
88. ‘virtuously’: ‘for itself or at least for the noblest ends that attend it’ (MSS.: M).
89. ‘not to be free from the Infamy of common Transgressors’: ‘not to procure the name of a sober & temperate person & so to bee out of the list of common offenders’ (MSS.: M).
90. ‘palliate obscure and closer’: ‘observe thy closer & hidden’ (MSS.: M).
91. ‘render Virtues disputable’: ‘tread away from true virtue’ (MSS.: M).
92. ‘Oblation’: ‘offering. Remember thy creator in the dayes of thy youth & lay up a treasure of pietie in thy healthfull dayes. & conserve thy health in the first place for that intention.’ (MSS.: M).
93. The Pinax commonly attributed to Socrates’s pupil Cebes, but actually written in the first century A.D.
94. Rough.
95. ‘Through the Pacific Sea, with a constant Gale from the East’ (Browne marg.).
&
nbsp; 96. i.e. satirists write satires. Seventeenth-century spelling permits the ambiguity in formal definitions of satyr: ‘a Monster having a body like a man, but all hairy, with legges and feet like a Goat; it is also a biting verse’ (Cockeram).
97. ‘Who is said to have Castrated himself’ (Browne marg.: as below, p. 418, note 5).
98. ‘Mite’: the reading in Christian Morals (below, p. 418); but the 1st edition of 1690 reads ‘Mitre’.
99. Literally ‘not beyond’ – i.e. the terminal point.
100. Interpretation (cf. above, p. 171, note 9).
101. The river whose crossing by Caesar in 49 B.C. marked the beginning of the civil war.
102. i.e. by a private door of repentance.
103. ‘Anger is short-lived madness’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Horace, Epistles, I, ii, 62).
104. Displeasure with.
105. In Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 5 (Browne marg.).
106. Protestants have not actually questioned the Epistle’s canonical status, but many – especially Luther – disliked its emphasis on works at the expense of faith.
107. From St Paul’s hymn to charity in 1 Corinthians 13.
108. ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ (Browne marg.: as below, p. 423, note 21).
109. ‘Even when the days are shortest’ (Browne marg.: as below, p. 422, note 18). The paragraph amplifies Ephesians 4.26: ‘Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’
110. ‘Alluding to the Tower of Oblivion mentioned by Procopius [History of the Wars, I, 4–5], which was the name of a Tower of Imprisonment among the Persians: whosoever was put therein, he was as it were buried alive, and it was Death for any but to name him’ (Browne marg.: as below, p. 422, note 19).
111. Matthew 11.12 (Browne marg.: as below, p. 424, note 26).
112. i.e. the ideal wise man as described by Zeno (in Cicero, About the Ends, III, 22).
113. ‘Ovation a petty and minor kind of Triumph’ (Browne marg.: as below p. 417, note 3).
114. Cf. ‘Lucifer keeps his court in my breast, Legion is revived in me’ (above, p. 125).
115. Temperamental (cf. above, p. 69, note 37).
116. As above, p. 69, note 38.
1. Brackets designate the passages forming part of A Letter to a Friend (see headnote, above).
2. ‘That is, in armour, in a state of military vigilance. One of the Grecian chiefs used to represent open force by the lion’s skin, and policy by the fox’s tail’ (SJ).
3. ‘Ovation a petty and minor Kind of Triumph’ (Browne marg.; as above, p. 413, note 113).
4. Cf. the violent conflict between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the marriage of Perithous.
5. ‘Who is said to have Castrated himself’ (Browne marg.: as above, p. 408, note 97).
6. As above, p. 301, note 23.
7. Ecclesiastes 11.2 (Browne marg.).
8. Luke 6.30 (Browne marg.).
9. Proverbs 19.17.
10. ‘the time when money lent out at interest was commonly repaid’ (SJ).
11. 2 Kings 6.5–7.
12. ‘That is, with a position as immutable as that of the magnetical axis, which is popularly supposed to be invariably parallel to the meridian, or to stand exactly north and south’ (SJ).
13. ‘where prudent Simplicity hath fix’d thee’ (as above, p. 409): ‘when prudent simplicity hath fixt thee’ (1716 ed.).
14. ‘Optimi malorum pessimi bonorum’ (Browne marg.). The dictum, most likely proverbial, is translated in the text.
15. Mutable.
16. The monument in Alexandria commemorating the city’s capture by Diocletian.
17. i.e. the eight members of Noah’s family.
18. ‘Even when the days are shortest’ (Browne marg.: as above, p. 412, note 109).
19. See above, p. 412, note 110.
20. See above, p. 411, note 105.
21. ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ (Browne marg.: as above, p. 412, note 108).
22. Cf. The Garden of Cyrus on the stars as ‘rayes and flashing glimpses of the Empyreall light’ etc. (above, p. 375).
23. On Atlantis, the mythical island ‘vaster than Libya and Asia put together’, see Plato, Timaeus, 24e.
24. Speculative.
25. ‘The powers of vengeance’ (SJ). Adrastea is an epithet of Nemesis.
26. Matthew 11.12 (Browne marg.: as above, p. 412, note 111).
27. i.e. gods: rulers who imitate the Lord God (Elohim).
28. The moon’s ‘noise’ was thought to have formed part of the music of the spheres (above, p. 149).
29. Alluding to the story of Ulysses, who stopped the ears of his companions with wax when they passed by the Sirens’ (SJ): Odyssey, XII, 173.
30. i.e. sycophants or malevolent accusers.
31. Jonah 4.6–10: ‘the gourd… came up in a night, and perished in a night’.
32. i.e. which need to be preserved.
33. The time span of ephemerides (as above, p. 81, note 104) surpasses by far that of the quadrennial Olympic games.
34. i.e. after the Last Judgement.
35. i.e. deaths. See above, p. 309, note 21.
36. i.e. no one who is guilty. The phrase echoes Juvenal, Satires, XIII, 2–3.
37. ‘that is… though we find in ourselves the imperfections of humanity’ (SJ).
38. ‘As Alexander the Great did’ (Browne marg.).
39. ‘Only placed at a distance in the same line’ (SJ).
40. i.e. ‘the mad Hercules’, as in the title of Seneca’s tragedy.
41. ‘Knave, Rascal’ (Blount).
42. i.e. the soul, represented in Phaedrus (246, 253) as two winged horses – one black, the other white – and a charioteer.
43. Chariot races (from ludi circenses: the games in Rome’s Circus Maximus).
44. ‘Fight, strife’ (Cockeram).