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390 notably the Christian Morals and Antiquities of Norwich, were prepared for publication, and appeared after his death. In 1671 he received the honour of knighthood from Charles II. on his visit to Norwich; and in 1682 he died on his seventy-seventh birthday. Browne is in every way a remarkable and peculiar writer. His writings are among the few specimens of purely lite rary work produced during a period of great political excitement and discord. England was passing through its greatest convulsion ; events of mighty moment were being transacted round him, and he remained placidly indifferent. While the grandest minds of his country were busied with the important affairs of state, he was revising his Eeligio Medici, and his book was published in the very year in which the civil war broke out. While England was torn with civil discord, and the liberty of her children was being bought with their blood, Browne serenely pursued his studies at Norwich, to all appearance as indifferent to con temporary events as if he had belonged to another planet. Just when there carne a lull in the conflict, when the royal power was broken, and the air was filled with doubts, anxieties, and negotiations, Browne published his Pseudo- doxia Epidemica. The death of the king, the expulsion of the parliament, the establishment of the protectorate, passed by him like a breath which he heeded not. But the unearthing of some sepulchral urns at once roused his attention, and furnished occasion for a train of most magnificent and majestic reflections on the short space of human life, on the signs and symbols of mortality. A mind like this is a psychological curiosity, and its pecu liarities are faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his -works. In some respects, of course, he resembles his contemporaries ; in his, as in all other writings of the 1 7th century, there is a plentiful display of erudition, copious citation of authorities, and lavish quotation from older writers. Some part also of the peculiarity of his style may be ascribed to the general tendency of the language at that period. It was a time of unusual richness of diction ; great writers did not hesitate to coin words and phrases as occasion required them, and ample raw material was supplied by the great mass of literature, which had been but recently opened up, and which was then being assimi lated. But Browne stands apart from his contemporaries by reason of the peculiar and unique cast of his mind. Deeply speculative, imbued with the Platonic mysticism which taught him to look upon this world as only the image, the shadow of an invisible system, he regarded the whole of ex perience but as food for contemplation. Nothing is too great or too small, too far removed or too near at hand for him ; all finds a place in the universe of being, which he seems to regard almost from the position of an outsider. His general mood may be characterized as the metaphysical ; not that he speculated systematically on the problems of existence, but because he dwells repeatedly, and with evident delight, upon what transcends the little sphere of our life, and, like Shakespeare, is fond of meditating on the outward and visible signs of mortality, and on what lies beyond the grave. Of Browne, however, as of our greatest writers, it is true that the style is the man. The form of his thought is as peculiar and remarkable as the matter; the two, indeed, react upon one another. It is a style altogether unique, rich, with a lavish use of metaphor and analogy majestic and swelling, and with a fine antique flavour about it. Much of its quaintness, no doubt, depends on the excessive employment of Latinized words, great part of which have never succeeded in making their way into the standard language ; but the peculiarities of the vocabulary do not entirely exhaust those of the style. Of his four master pieces the Eeligio Medici is that in which we are most in contact with the writer himself. The book was a puzzle to contemporaries, and is still hard to understand. It is the confession of faith of a mind keen and sceptical in some aspects, but on the whole deeply imbued with the sense of the mysteriousness of true religion, and willing to yield itself up without reserve to the requirements of faith. &quot; I love/ he says, &quot;to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an 0, Altitiidof&quot; The Vulgar Errors is a wonderful storehouse of out-of-the-way facts and scraps of erudition, exhibiting a singular mixture of credulity and shrewdness. The style is more direct and simple than in the other works. The Garden of Cyrus is a continued illustration of one quaint conceit. The whole universe is ransacked for examples of the Quincunx, and he discovers, as Coleridge says, &quot; quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything ! &quot; But the whole strength of his genius and the wonderful charm of his style are to be sought in the Urnburial, the concluding chapter of which, for richness of imagery and majestic pomp of diction, can hardly be paral leled in the English language. For anything at aU resembling it we must turn to the finest passages of Jeremy Taylor or of Milton s prose writings.

1em  BROWNE,, an English poet, descended of a good family, was born at Tavistock in Devonshire, in 1590. Having passed through the grammar school of his native place, he was sent to Exeter College, Oxford, and became tutor to Robert Dormer, afterwards earl of Carnarvon. After having received in 1624 the honorary degree of M.A., he was taken into the family of William, earl of Pembroke, and improved his fortune so much that he is said to have purchased an estate. Nothing seems to be known of his after life, and no date has ever been given for his death, All his work was done in his youth, the first part of Britannia s Pastorals having been published in 1613, The Shejyherd s Pipe in 1614, and the second part of the Pastorals in 1616. He belongs to the school of Spenser, and his merits may be summed up briefly as extreme sweetness of verse, idyllic nature-painting, and richness of descriptive faculty. The Pastorals are about the finest specimens we have in earlier literature of luxuriant sensuous description of ordinary country life. They were highly popular in their time. (See Wood, Athen. Oxon.)  BROWNE,, an eminent traveller, was born at Great-Tower-Hill, London, July 25, 1768. At seventeen he was sent to Oriel College, Oxford, Having had a moderate competence left him by his father, on leaving the university he applied himself entirely to literary pursuits. But the fame of Bruce s travels, and of the first discoveries made by the African Association, determined him to become an explorer of Central Africa. Accordingly, he left England at the close of 1791 and arrived at Alexandria in January 1792. He spent a few months in visiting Siwah, the sup posed site of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and employed the remainder of the year in examining the whole of Egypt. In the spring of 1793 he visited Suez and Sinai, and in May set out for Darfur. This was his most important journey, in which he acquired a great variety of original information. He endured much hardship, and was unable to effect his purpose of returning by Abyssinia. He did not reach Egypt till 1796; after this he spent a year in Syria, and did not arrive in London till September 1798. In 1800 he published his travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the year 1792 to 1798, in one volume 4to. The work was highly esteemed, and is classed by Major Rennell 