Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/251

Rh sympathies. It is not of the sombre Jansenist Pascal that he reminds the reader, but—despite his orthodoxy, his belief in witches, and the imaginative vein in his reflections—of the later optimistic rationalists and their superficial natural religion, of Addison and his planets—

"singing as they shine                    'The hand that made us is divine.'

In the Pseudodoxia Epidemica Browne discusses at considerable length the sources of error, and includes among them not only Satan but, like Hobbes and Pascal, respect for antiquity, and undue subservience to authority. He is, however, very far from attaining to any clear distinction between the legitimate spheres of tradition and experiment (the borrowings of poets are arraigned alongside the transmission of untested tenets in science), or to any right understanding of the conditions of valid experimental proof. In none of his works is his style more obscured by Latin neologisms.

The crowning example of Browne's meditative, sonorous, imaginative eloquence is the Hydriotaphia. Here his antiquarian rather than scientific turn of mind, his imaginative piety, his musical polysyllables and periods, combined to produce a harmonious and impressive whole. He had read of and reflected on the burial customs of different times and nations, their origin and their significance (burying and burning, urns and funeral lamps, rites and beliefs), and each detail had its charm for his, not sombre but meditative, poetical imagination. Vessels, he tells us, containing wines have been found in ancient tombs