Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/248

228 of Love Melancholy, again, with a serious and eloquent eulogy of Charity. Thereafter he proceeds to a discussion of "heroical love," elaborated especially from Latin poets and Italian writers, in a way that is not always edifying, but closes—ironically or seriously, who can say?—with the prescription of a happy marriage as the only cure for the woes of lovers. Burton's style, apart from its excess of quotation, has nothing particularly notable about it. It is simple, straightforward, and can be vigorous, but is not specially distinguished in phrase or rhythm.

Beauty of phrase and musical cadence are the charms which have given enduring life to the musings of an author not more learned than Burton, nor with more claim to be classed among the original thinkers of the century, but possessing in a higher degree the impassioned imagination of the poet. This was Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) the antiquarian and philosophic doctor at Norwich. The son of a London merchant, Browne was educated at Oxford, but pursued his medical studies at Montpellier, Padua, and Leyden. He returned to England in 1633, and practised for some time at Halifax in Yorkshire, where, in all probability, he composed the Religio Medici, a meditative and eloquent survey of his beliefs and sympathies. The work, circulating in manuscript