to have been so early sown in it. Surrounded only by companions as gay in manners and dissolute in morals as himself, he became their leader in every species of vice. His qualities, or rather his splendid vices, were precisely such as fitted him to shine in a dissolute court. Promptitude of invention, a ready wit, considerable skill in the fashionable amusements of the day, a handsome person, engaging manners, and a soul set free from every restraint of conscience,—all conspired to make him a fit leader in the revels of Comus. Accordingly, Burnet declares that, for five years together, Rochester was not one single day free from the influence of liquor, and led a life of unmingled sensuality and profaneness. Sometimes, in the disguise of a porter or a beggar, he devoted weeks to the pursuit of the lowest amours, and the society of the most brutalized portion of his species; at other times he enacted the part of a strolling player or mountebank. Once he practised physic for some weeks in the character of an itinerant quack. On other occasions he would amuse himself by imposing on his acquaintance under some assumed character and disguise. "Thus," says Dr Johnson," in a course of drunken gaiety, and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard of every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one-and-thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay.”

In October 1679, when he was slowly recovering from a severe illness, he was visited by Dr Burnet, upon an intimation that such a visit would be very agreeable to him. The bishop has left on record some particulars of his various interviews with the dying nobleman, from which it appears that, when the world was at last receding from his view, conscience awoke, and religion and the concerns of eternity began to press themselves upon his thoughts; and that the reasonings and prayers of the worthy prelate were blessed to the conviction and conversion of his catechumen. Dr Burnet's statement has been long before the public, and is so well known, that it is unnecessary for us to quote from it. It is a simple and deeply affecting document, which, to use the language of one whose judgment will hardly be called in question, even by those who affect to sneer at the story of Rochester's conversion," the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety.”

"The earl of Rochester," says Dr Johnson," was eminent for the vigour of his colloqual wit, and remarkable for many wild pranks and sallies of extravagance. The glare of his general character diffused itself upon his writings; the compositions of a man whose name was heard so often, were certain of attention, and from many readers certain of applause. This blaze of reputation is not yet quite extinguished; and his poetry still retains some splendour beyond that which genius has bestowed. Wood and Burnet give us reason to believe, that much was imputed to him which he did not write. I know not by whom the original collection was made, or by what authority its genuineness was ascertained. The first edition was published in the year of his death with an air of concealment, professing in the title-page to be printed at Antwerp. Of some of the pieces, however, there is no

doubt. The Imitation of Horace's Satire, the Verses to Lord Mulgrave, the Satire against Man,—the verses upon Nothing, and perhaps some others, are, I believe, genuine, and perhaps most of those which the late collection exhibits. As he cannot be supposed to have found leisure for any course of continued study, his pieces are commonly short, such as one fit of resolution would produce. His songs have no particular character; they tell, like other songs, in smooth and easy language, of scorn and kindness, dismission and desertion, absence and inconstancy, with the common places of artificial courtship. They are commonly smooth and easy, but have little nature, and little sentiment. His imitation of Horace on Lucilius is not inelegant or unhappy. In the reign of Charles the Second began that adaptation, which has since been very frequent, of ancient poetry to present times, and perhaps few will be found where the parallelism is better preserved than in this. The versification is indeed sometimes careless, but it is sometimes vigorous and weighty."

Sir Thomas Browne.

BORN A. D. 1605.-DIED A. D. 1682.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE, an eminent English physician, and the celebrated author of the Religio Medici,' was born in the city of London, in the parish of St Michael, Cheapside, on the 19th of October, 1605. He was the son of a highly respectable merchant, whose family belonged to Cheshire. Young Browne began his education at Winchester, and, in 1623, was entered a gentleman-commoner of Pembroke college, Oxford. His father died during his nonage, and his mother having married again, he was left to the care of a guardian, who appears to have rather abused his trust. Having taken his Master of Arts degree, he directed his attention to medical science, and first commenced practice in Oxfordshire. Soon afterwards he accompanied his step-father, Sir Thomas Dutton, to Ireland, and from thence he proceeded to Montpellier, successively studying there and at Padua. Returning home by way of Holland, he was created Doctor of physic in the university of Leyden.

Browne returned to London about the year 1634, and amused himself the following year in sketching his most celebrated treatise, the Religio Medici It does not appear to have been originally designed for publication, for it contains a number of particulars relating to himself, which we can hardly imagine him deliberately making the world acquainted with. He tells us therein that his life had been a miracle of thirty years, 66 which, to relate, were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable;" that he was unmarried, and had never yet cast a true affection on a woman; that he had been a great traveller, and that he understood six languages ; and in a letter to Sir Kenelm Digby, deprecating some strictures which he had been informed Sir Kenelm was about to publish on his work, he says that his book "was penned many years past, and with no intention for the press, or the least desire to oblige the faith of any man to its assertions,-that it was contrived in his private study, and

as an exercise unto himself, rather than an exercitation for any other, --and that it had passed from his hand under a broken and imperfect copy, which, by frequent transcription, had still run forward into corruption." "If," he adds, "when the true copy shall be extant, you shall esteem it worth your vacant hours to discourse thereon, you shall sufficiently honour me in the vouchsafe of your refutation, and I oblige the whole world in the occasion of your pen." The learned knight, nothing behind the young doctor in complimentary language, hastened to assure him that he had no such serious intentions of assailing his treatise, as had been by report ascribed to him; that the few strictures he had penned upon it at the suggestion of Lord Dorset, were the hasty production of a single day; that he had prohibited their publication; and that, "to encounter such a sinewy opposite, or make animadversion upon so smart a piece," he was conscious "a solid stock and exercise in school-learning" was requisite. Few works have made a greater noise in the world, or produced a greater sensation on first appearance, as we say now-a-days,-than Browne's Religio Medici.' The smatterer, Guy Patin, in a letter dated from Paris, 7th April, 1645, says of it:-" The book entitled 'Religio Medici' is in high credit here. The author has wit; there are abundance of fine things in that book; he is a humourist, whose thoughts are very agreeable, but who, in my opinion, is to seek for a master in religion-as many others are—and, in the end, perhaps, may find none. One may say of him, as Philip de Comines did of the founder of the Minimes, a hermit of Calabria, Francis de Paula, he is still alive, and may grow worse as well as better.'" Salmasius, too, declared that it contained "many exorbitant conceptions in religion, and would probably find but frowning entertainment." Tobias Wagner, a German critic, affirmed that the seeds of atheistical impiety were so scattered throughout Browne's book, that it could hardly be read without danger of infection, an opinion in which he was seconded by his two countrymen, Muller and Reiser. The learned John Francis Buddæus hesitated not to enrol Browne in his list of English atheists, in conjunction with Herbert, Hobbes, and Toland, whilst Reimmannus and Heister zealously repelled the charge of irreligion brought against him. Browne himself, in this work, declares that he is a good Protestant of the English church :-"I am a born subject," he says, "and, therefore, in a double obligation, subscribe unto her articles, and endeavour to observe her constitutions; whatever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason, or the humour and fashion of my devotion,-neither believing this because Luther affirmed it, or disproving that because Calvin hath disavouched it; I condemn not all things in the council of Trent, nor approve all in the synod of Dort. In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.' In fact, few secular writers of Browne's age have been more solicitous to express their undoubting faith in Scriptures, or mentioned them with such unvaried reverence; at the same time it must be confessed that there is a wildness of conception, and singularity of expression, in much which Browne has written, which was calculated to excite surprise, and throw him open to cen

sure. A single extract will afford the reader some notion of the style in which the Religio Medici' is written :-" There are a bundle of curiosities not only in philosophy but in divinity, proposed and discussed by men of supposed ability, which indeed are not worthy our vacant hours, much less our serious studies. 'Tis ridiculous to put off or down the general flood of Noah in that particular inundation of Deucalion; that there was a deluge, seems not to me so great a miracle as that there is not one always. How all the kinds of creatures, not only in their own bulks, but with a competency of food and sustenance, might be preserved in one ark, and within the extent of 300 cubits, to a reason that rightly examines, it will appear very feasible. There is another secret, not contained in the Scripture, which is more hard to comprehend, and put the honest father (St Augustin) to the refuge of a miracle, and that is, not only how the distinct pieces of the world, and divided islands, should be first planted by men, but inhabited by tigers, panthers, and bears; how America abounded with beasts of prey and noxious animals, yet contained not in it that necessary creature a horse, is very strange." Again; "Search all the legends of times past, and the fabulous conceits of those present, and 'twill be hard to find one that deserves to carry the buckler unto Sampson; yet is all this of an easy possibility, if we conceive a Divine concourse, or an influence from the little finger of the Almighty." It is not easy to say what definite object Browne proposed to himself in this essay; whatever it was, or whether he really had any, it is a work of prodigious fancy and ponderous erudition. It has been called "the dissection of a human soul,"-" the picture of the author's mind painted by himself,"-" a hard task, viz. to make us, in some measure, acquainted with the essence as well as attributes of God, the nature of angels, the mysteries of Providence, the divinity of the Scriptures, and which is, perhaps, most difficult of all-with ourselves." It was quickly translated into Latin, French, Italian, and German. The surreptitious edition was printed in the year 1642; the genuine edition did not come out till the spring following; but, by the year 1685, it passed through eight editions.

In 1636 Dr Browne settled at Norwich, and in 1637 was created Doctor of Physic in the university of Oxford. In 1641 he married a lady of the name of Mileham, whose family belonged to the county of Norfolk, and who is described as a lady of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband, both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." This latter step, though it certainly exposed the man who had just been wishing, in his Religio Medici,' that "we might procreate like trees," and had declared that "the whole world was made for man, but only the twelfth part of man for woman," to the charge of inconsistency, was fraught with happiness to the Doctor, and his fair partner, who lived in great harmony with each other for one-and-forty years.

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In 1646 he published his Pseudodoxia Epidemica,' or 'Enquiries into very many received Tenets, and commonly presumed Truths," a work of most multifarious erudition, and which was very favourably received by the learned, although virulently attacked by one Ross, "a sort of knight-errant in the literary world, whose Dulcinea was antiquity," and a Dr John Robinson.

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In 1658 Browne published his Hydriotaphia, Urne Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urnes lately found in Norfolk.' From the trivial incident of the discovery of a few urns at Walsingham, he takes occasion to treat of the funeral rites of all nations, and has endeavoured to trace these rites to the principles and feelings which gave rise to them. The extent of reading displayed in this singular treatise is most astonishing, and the whole is irradiated with the flashes of a bright and highly poetical genius, though we are not sure that any regular plan can be discovered in the work. It opens with the following fine trumpet-like tones:- "In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers; who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to wrack the bowels of Potosi, and regions towards the centre. Nature hath furnished one part of the earth, and men another. The treasures of time lie high in urnes, coignes, and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegitables. Time hath endlesse rarities, and showes of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great antiquity, America, lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the urne unto us." He thinks that the practices of burning and of burying the dead were equally ancient; and shows why some nations have chosen to bury, and others to burn their dead. In the second chapter he discusses the probability of the supposition, that the urns discovered" in a field of Old Walsingham," and which gave rise to the essay, were Roman, and either contained the ashes of Romans themselves, or of Romanized natives. In the third chapter we are presented with some curious remarks on the contents of the urns. He informs us that the ancients, "without confused burnings, affectionately compounded their bones, passionately endeavouring to continue their living unions. And when distance of death denied such conjunctions, unsatisfyed affections conceived some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lye urne by urne, and touch but in their names." He adverts to the adornments of the cemiterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs, as iterately affecting," in their adornments and sculptures," the pourtraits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as hopeful draughts, and hinting imagery of the resurrection, which is the life of the grave, and sweetens our habitations in the land of moles and pismires." After reviewing the funeral customs of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Jews, Danes, &c. he concludes in favour of cremation or burning; for, says he, "to be knaved out of our graves,—to have our sculls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragicall abominations, escaped in burning burials." The Hydriotaphia has the following, amongst many other splendid passages, which must give the reader an exalted idea of Browne's style and intellect:- "There is no antidote against the opium of time which temporally considereth all things. Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors'. To be read by bare inscriptions, like many in Gruter,-to hope for eternity by any metrical epithets, or first letters of our names, -to be studied by antiquaries who we were, and have new names given us like many of the mummies,—are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages. The night of time far sur