Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/252

232 which if any have tasted they have far exceeded the palates of antiquity, liquors not to be computed by years of annual magistrates, but by great conjunctions and the fatal periods of kingdoms. The draughts of consulary date were but crude unto these, and Opimian wine but in the must unto them." So he muses, most eloquent when the topic is most fanciful.  The last chapter of the five is a not always equal but, for him, wonderfully sustained peroration on the vanity of human "inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories," not leading to any Hamlet-like disparagement of life, but to the exaltation of the Christian hope of immortality, "ready to be anything in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus."

The Garden of Cyrus, which accompanied the Hydriotaphia, is a fantastic trifle, an excursus on the quincunx, a favourite arrangement for plants and trees in old gardens, which Browne, with an extraordinary parade of learning and the mystical ardour of an ancient philosopher dealing with number, finds everywhere, in the macrocosm without and the microcosm within. Of his posthumous works the most characteristic is the Letter to a Friend, composed about 1672,—a strange description of the death of a common friend, in which he analyses and comments on every symptom of his last days, with the same parade of erudition and the same studied eloquence as he had bestowed in the Hydriotaphia on burial rites and their significance. Nothing is more characteristic of Browne, antiquarian and rhetorician,