from words of classical derivation as the sermons of Latimer.  A very little reflection and inquiry will suffice to show how completely mistaken this view really is.  In the first place, the theory that Browne considered all unclassical words ‘barbarous’ and unfit to interpret his thoughts, is clearly untenable, owing to the obvious fact that his writings are full of instances of the deliberate use of such words.  So much is this the case, that Pater declares that a dissertation upon style might be written to illustrate Browne’s use of the words ‘thin’ and ‘dark.’  A striking phrase from the Christian Morals will suffice to show the deliberation with which Browne sometimes employed the latter word:—­’the areopagy and dark tribunal of our hearts.’  If Browne had thought the Saxon epithet ‘barbarous,’ why should he have gone out of his way to use it, when ‘mysterious’ or ‘secret’ would have expressed his meaning?  The truth is clear enough.  Browne saw that ‘dark’ was the one word which would give, better than any other, the precise impression of mystery and secrecy which he intended to produce; and so he used it.  He did not choose his words according to rule, but according to the effect which he wished them to have.  Thus, when he wished to suggest an extreme contrast between simplicity and pomp, we find him using Saxon words in direct antithesis to classical ones.  In the last sentence of Urn Burial, we are told that the true believer, when he is to be buried, is ’as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.’  How could Browne have produced the remarkable sense of contrast which this short phrase conveys, if his vocabulary had been limited, in accordance with a linguistic theory, to words of a single stock?

There is, of course, no doubt that Browne’s vocabulary is extraordinarily classical.  Why is this?  The reason is not far to seek.  In his most characteristic moments he was almost entirely occupied with thoughts and emotions which can, owing to their very nature, only be expressed in Latinistic language.  The state of mind which he wished to produce in his readers was nearly always a complicated one:  they were to be impressed and elevated by a multiplicity of suggestions and a sense of mystery and awe.  ‘Let thy thoughts,’ he says himself, ’be of things which have not entered into the hearts of beasts:  think of things long past, and long to come:  acquaint thyself with the choragium of the stars, and consider the vast expanse beyond them.  Let intellectual tubes give thee a glance of things which visive organs reach not.  Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles; and thoughts of things, which thoughts but tenderly touch.’  Browne had, in fact, as Dr. Johnson puts it, ’uncommon sentiments’; and how was he to express them unless by a language of pomp, of allusion, and of elaborate rhythm?  Not only is the Saxon form of speech devoid of splendour and suggestiveness; its simplicity is still further emphasised by a spondaic rhythm which seems to produce (by some mysterious rhythmic law) an atmosphere of ordinary life, where, though the pathetic may be present, there is no place for the complex or the remote.  To understand how unsuitable such conditions would be for the highly subtle and rarefied art of Sir Thomas Browne, it is only necessary to compare one of his periods with a typical passage of Saxon prose.