That Johnson and his disciples had no inkling of the inner spirit of the writer to whose outward form they owed so much, has been pointed out by Mr. Gosse, who adds that Browne’s ’genuine merits were rediscovered and asserted by Coleridge and Lamb.’  But we have already observed that Mr. Gosse’s own assertion of these merits lies a little open to question.  His view seems to be, in fact, the precise antithesis of Dr. Johnson’s; he swallows the spirit of Browne’s writing, and strains at the form.  Browne, he says, was ’seduced by a certain obscure romance in the terminology of late Latin writers,’ he used ’adjectives of classical extraction, which are neither necessary nor natural,’ he forgot that it is better for a writer ’to consult women and people who have not studied, than those who are too learnedly oppressed by a knowledge of Latin and Greek.’  He should not have said ‘oneiro-criticism,’ when he meant the interpretation of dreams, nor ‘omneity’ instead of ‘oneness’; and he had ’no excuse for writing about the “pensile” gardens of Babylon, when all that is required is expressed by “hanging."’ Attacks of this kind—­attacks upon the elaboration and classicism of Browne’s style—­are difficult to reply to, because they must seem, to anyone who holds a contrary opinion, to betray such a total lack of sympathy with the subject as to make argument all but impossible.  To the true Browne enthusiast, indeed, there is something almost shocking about the state of mind which would exchange ‘pensile’ for ‘hanging,’ and ‘asperous’ for ‘rough,’ and would do away with ‘digladiation’ and ‘quodlibetically’ altogether.  The truth is, that there is a great gulf fixed between those who naturally dislike the ornate, and those who naturally love it.  There is no remedy; and to attempt to ignore this fact only emphasises it the more.  Anyone who is jarred by the expression ‘prodigal blazes’ had better immediately shut up Sir Thomas Browne.  The critic who admits the jar, but continues to appreciate, must present, to the true enthusiast, a spectacle of curious self-contradiction.

If once the ornate style be allowed as a legitimate form of art, no attack such as Mr. Gosse makes on Browne’s latinisms can possibly be valid.  For it is surely an error to judge and to condemn the latinisms without reference to the whole style of which they form a necessary part.  Mr. Gosse, it is true, inclines to treat them as if they were a mere excrescence which could be cut off without difficulty, and might never have existed if Browne’s views upon the English language had been a little different.  Browne, he says, ’had come to the conclusion that classic words were the only legitimate ones, the only ones which interpreted with elegance the thoughts of a sensitive and cultivated man, and that the rest were barbarous.’  We are to suppose, then, that if he had happened to hold the opinion that Saxon words were the only legitimate ones, the Hydriotaphia would have been as free