they are always cited with an air of quietly humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that is straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command both rhythm and beauty of phrase.  It is a mistake to regard Burton from the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or loving delight in quaintness for quaintness’ sake.  His book is anything but scientific in form, but it is far from being the work of a recluse or a fool.  Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically an essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle treatise in diagnosis.

A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne.  Of all the men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said.  He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose Virginibus Puerisque is modelled on his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day.  His eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep thinking.  He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray fancies of an imaginative nature.  His best known work, the Religio Medici, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise.  Such work could never maintain its hold on taste if it were not carefully finished and constructed with elaborate care.  Browne, if he was not a great writer, was a literary artist of a high quality.  He exploits a quaint and lovable egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his delicately figured and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous and trivial when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they stand they are rich and melodious enough.

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In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author stands by himself.  John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the schools.  Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was his “original,” he has no connection—­other than a general similarity of purpose, moral and religious—­with Spenser’s followers.  To the fantastics he paid in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again.  He had no turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of Jonson.  In everything he did he was himself and his own master; he devised his own subjects and wrote his own style.  He stands alone and must be judged alone.