Then they brought a faggot, kindled with fire, and laid the same down at Doctor Ridley’s feet.  To whom Master Latimer spake in this manner:  ’Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man.  We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

Nothing could be better adapted to the meaning and sentiment of this passage than the limpid, even flow of its rhythm.  But who could conceive of such a rhythm being ever applicable to the meaning and sentiment of these sentences from the Hydriotaphia?

To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs.  We, whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.

Here the long, rolling, almost turgid clauses, with their enormous Latin substantives, seem to carry the reader forward through an immense succession of ages, until at last, with a sudden change of the rhythm, the whole of recorded time crumbles and vanishes before his eyes.  The entire effect depends upon the employment of a rhythmical complexity and subtlety which is utterly alien to Saxon prose.  It would be foolish to claim a superiority for either of the two styles; it would be still more foolish to suppose that the effects of one might be produced by means of the other.

Wealth of rhythmical elaboration was not the only benefit which a highly Latinised vocabulary conferred on Browne.  Without it, he would never have been able to achieve those splendid strokes of stylistic bravura, which were evidently so dear to his nature, and occur so constantly in his finest passages.  The precise quality cannot be easily described, but is impossible to mistake; and the pleasure which it produces seems to be curiously analogous to that given by a piece of magnificent brushwork in a Rubens or a Velasquez.  Browne’s ‘brushwork’ is certainly unequalled in English literature, except by the very greatest masters of sophisticated art, such as Pope and Shakespeare; it is the inspiration of sheer technique.  Such expressions as:  ’to subsist in bones and be but pyramidally extant’—­’sad and sepulchral pitchers which have no joyful voices’—­’predicament of chimaeras’—­’the irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity’—­are examples of this consummate mastery of language, examples which, with a multitude of others, singly deserve whole hours of delicious gustation, whole days of absorbed and exquisite worship.  It is pleasant to start out for a long walk with such a splendid phrase upon one’s lips as:  ’According to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven,’ to go for miles and miles with the marvellous syllables still rich upon the inward ear, and to return home with them in triumph.  It is then that one begins to understand how mistaken it was of Sir Thomas Browne not to have written in simple, short, straightforward Saxon English.