54. ‘vengeance’ (Elyot).
55. i.e. in the sense that history’s 6,000 years are about to expire (see above, p. 439, note 31).
56. 2 Samuel 10.4.
57. See above, p. 313, note 44.
58. Such as Circe’s reduction of Odysseus’s companions to swine (Odyssey, X, 237 ff.)
59. As above, p. 397, note 35.
60. Dancing area.
61. i.e. telescopes, here used metaphorically.
62. i.e. organs of vision.
63. As above, p. 351, note 51.
64. ‘To the utmost point of distance from earth and earthly things’ (SJ).
65. ‘border’ (Elyot).
66. i.e. the crystalline lens.
67. Referring to the Areopagus near the Acropolis at Athens, established as a judicial tribunal in the seventh to sixth centuries B.C.
68. Revelation 21.23.
69. Our ultimate vision of God.
70. 1 Kings 18.44.
71. John 21.18–19.
72. i.e. in that he had prophesied its fall (Jeremiah 21.7).
73. Binding oaths ‘by the Styx’, as in Iliad, XV, 38 (M).
74. Few.
75. ‘Which after many hundred years was found burning under ground, and went out as soon as the air came to it’ (Browne marg.). The improbable lamp was unearthed c. 1500.
76. ‘Jovem Lapidem jurare’ (Browne marg.): ‘the person making the oath would throw the stone away, wishing he too might be cast out if the oath was not kept’ (M).
77. ‘The vessel, into which the ticket of condemnation or acquittal was cast’ (SJ).
78. The hyperbolic oath is related by Knolles (Browne marg.).
79. So Quintus Curtius, VII, 8 (Browne marg.).
80. Tormenting.
81. ‘dissimulation’ (Elyot).
82. Driving force (M).
83. i.e. not the Roman code (see above, p. 269, note 17) but the two tables of stone on which the Decalogue was engraven (Deuteronomy 34.1).
84. i.e. the followers of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, respectively.
85. ‘That is, according to the rules laid down in our SAVIOUR’S sermon on the mount’ (SJ).
86. i.e. lived until his 100th year – ‘the sixtieth part’ of history’s duration (as above, p. 439, note 31).
87. ‘want or privation’ (Blount).
88. e.g. ‘all is vanity’ (Ecclesiastes 1.2).
89. Demetrius, who made silver shrines for Diana at Ephesus, told his fellow craftsmen: ‘by this craft we have our wealth’ (Acts 19.24–5).
90. Conflicts.
91. Non-repeatable.
92. Short course (in racing).
93. i.e. impersonations (referring to play-acting: see next note).
94. Play-acting. Cf. above, p. 119: ‘This is that one day’ etc.
95. Seneca, On Consolation to Marcia, XXII, 3 (Browne marg., quoting the Latin).
96. On Old Age, XXIII.
97. On the commonplace notion that man was created to repair the ‘detriment’ of the expelled angels, see Paradise Lost, VII, 154–61. Cf. §95.
98. Job 38.4 and 7 (Browne marg.): the question God puts to Job.
99. Emergences – i.e. from non-being into being. ‘Ideal’ alludes as always to the Ideas in God’s mind (above, p. 31).
100. Cf. above, pp. 131–2.
101. Isaiah 51.6.
102. As above, p. 119, note 290.
103. Suetonius, Nero, XXXVIII.
104. As above, p. 131, note 348.
105. Or indeed Milton: ‘a third part of the gods’ is said to have fallen (Paradise Lost, VI, 156), on the basis of the claim (in Revelation 12.4) that the dragon ‘drew the third part of the stars’.
106. See above, p. 439, note 31.
107. The bracketed sentences are also in the concluding paragraph of A Letter to a Friend, above, pp. 413–14.
108. In the penultimate paragraph of Hydriotaphia, above, p. 314.
1. i.e. sleep. See above, p. 311, note 35.
2. ‘somnia Liparitana, turbulent dreams as men have observed to have in the Isle of Lipara, abounding in sulphurous & minerall exhalations, sounds, smoakes & fires’ (Browne marg.). Cf. above, p. 427, note 46.
3. On Solomon’s sleep, see Proverbs 3.24; on Jacob’s dream of the ladder to heaven: Genesis 28.11 ff.; and on Adam’s sleep which resulted in Eve’s creation: Genesis 2.21.
4. In his short treatise Of Prophecy in Sleep.
5. On these authorities on oneirocriticism – the art of interpreting dreams – see the dictionary of names, below, pp. 513 ff.
6. Genesis 41.8. Browne’s expectations of the Egyptians centres on his approbation of Hermes Trismegistus (above, p. 30).
7. Daniel 2.5.
8. A marginal note, in providing the Greek word συρος (satyros), suggests the intended pun (sa-tyros, literally ‘Tyre will be thine’).
9. ‘Dactylos’ (Browne marg.) means – as the text makes clear – both finger and the fruit of the date-palm.
10. Plutarch, Cicero, XLIV.
11. ‘The reputation of Crassus for wealth and avariciousness was matched by that of Antony for liberality’ (E).
12. Daniel 1.12–16.
13. Plutarch, Dion, IX.
14. ‘Plutarch’ (Browne marg.) in Demetrius, XXVII.
15. i.e. arrears, payments due.
16. i.e. swooned, fainted.
17. e.g. Tertullian (Browne marg.).
18. ‘Sunt geminæ somni portæ. The Ivory & the horny gate; false dreames out of the ivory gate, true out of the horny’ (Browne marg.). The statement appeals to the remarks on true and false dreams in the Odyssey, XIX, 560–65.
1. Browne’s Christian Morals (see headnote, above).
2. Browne’s mother Anne was the daughter of Paul Garroway of Acton, Middlesex.
3. The charge, made in Whitefoot’s earlier sketch of Browne’s life (below, note 34) and much exaggerated by Johnson, is no longer accepted. For the actual details, so far as they are known, consult N.J. Endicott, UTQ, XXX (1961), 180–210; cf. J.-J. Denonain, ‘Le reître et le jouvenceau’, Caliban, new series, I (1965), i, 7–20.
4. Anthony à Wood, who had written a highly eclectic sketch of Browne’s activities in Athenæ Oxonienses (ed. Philip Bliss [1820], IV, 56–9).
5. i.e. medicine.
6. The ‘authorised’ edition was published in 1643. See above, p. 57.
7. Observations upon Religio Medici, written at a single sitting on 22–23 December 1642, published in 1643, and usually bound with Browne’s work from 1659. Cf. §343.
8. The ‘severe censure’, signed by ‘A.B.’, accuses Digby that inter alia he either ‘mistaketh, or traduceth the intention, and (besides a parenthesis sometimes upon the Author) onely medleth with those points from whence he takes a hint to deliver his prepar’d conceptions’. The charges are not altogether unfair.
9. John Merryweather’s Latin translation was published in 1644. The Dutch version appeared in 1665; the French, in 1668; the German, in 1746 – but the Italian is not extant. The English annotations were attempted by Thomas Keck (§ 257).
10. The French scholar with whom Milton was later to engage in a violent controversy (1651).
11. For the full title of Ross’s work, see §265.
12. As below, p. 501, note 28.
13. Cf. above, pp. 148–9.
14. Actually twelve.
15. Dr Johnson errs. The successive editions of Pseudodoxia Epidemica display substantial amendments in both matter and manner (see above, p. 33).
16. The Dutch version was published in 1688; the German, in 1680; the French, in 1733 – as well as an Italian one in 1737. For the full title of Ross’s work, see §294.
17. Hardly: see above, p. 160, note 139.
18. The author is unknown.
19. i.e. the parodic Batrachomyomachia usually attributed to Homer (as above, p. 138, note 22), the Culex of Virgil, the Muiopotmos of Spenser, and the Dies Aestiva, sive de umbra paegnion (1610) o
f Jan van de Wouwer.
20. The first, edited by Thomas Tenison, is the Certain Miscellany Tracts (1684); the other, the Posthumous Works (1712).
21. ‘fowling’ and ‘fishing’.
22. James Howell in Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642) actually supports Browne’s contention, not Johnson’s.
23. As below p. 547.
24. In the philosopher Berkeley’s Verses on the prospect of planting arts and learning in America (1752), which include the celebrated line ‘Westward the Course of Empire takes its way…’
25. i.e. Christian Morals (see headnote, above, p. 481).
26. Dr Johnson as an ardent royalist much exaggerates the king’s perception. The true circumstances are noted above, p. 21.
27. Published in 1677; see §334.
28. The ensuing paragraphs (to p. 505) reproduce nearly the sum of John Whitefoot’s ‘Some Minutes for the Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, prefixed to Browne’s Posthumous Works (1712), pp. xxvii–xxxi, xxxiii-xxxvii. Browne himself spoke of the author as ‘my learned and faithfull old freind Mr John Whitefoot, Rector of Heigham and very deserving clark of the convocation for Norfolk’ (in Repertorium, K, III, 134).
29. i.e. possessing fullness of flesh, in good condition.
30. Elias Hutter’s Nuremberg Polyglot Boble (1599), which included: exts in Hebrew, Chaldee, Greek, Latin, German, and French.
31. i.e. surprising, utterly exceptional.
32. ‘O grief, you do nothing’: a common expression.
33. ‘Galen affords riches’: a medical axiom.
34. Whitefoot’s text adds, ‘… having spent the greatest Part of his Patrimony in his Travels’. A footnote further adds, ‘He was likewise very much defrauded by one of his Guardians’ (see above, p. 483, note 3).
35. The faculty of conjecturing.
36. Isaac Watts, in Reliquiae juveniles (1734).
37. The reputed ‘stability’ did not become apparent until the later part of the seventeenth century.
38. i.e. modelling, shaping.
39. Both ‘arthritical analogies’ and ‘paralogical’ are now obsolete; but ‘commensality’ is still in use. Browne’s other contributions to the language still current, include: antediluvian, electricity, hallucination, incontrovertible, literary, medical, precarious, retrogression, etc. (all in Pseudodoxia Epidemica).
40. Cf. above, p. 48, note 50.
41. Dr Johnson quotes in a footnote from Sir John Davies:
Therefore no hereticks desire to spread
Their wild opinions like these epicures.
For so their stagg’ring thoughts are [comforted],
And other men’s assent their doubt assures.
(Nosce Teipsum, ed. A.B. Grosart, 1876,1, 83)
42. 1 Corinthians 13. 5 and 7.
The Major Works (English Library) Page 64