When Sir Thomas Browne, in the last decade of his life, was asked to furnish data for the writing of his memoirs in Wood’s ’Athenae Oxonienses,’ he gave in a letter to his friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest words his birthplace and the places of his education, his admission as “Socius Honorarius of the College of Physitians in London,” the date of his being knighted, and the titles of the four books or tracts which he had printed; and ended with “Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be published.”

This account of himself, curter than many an epitaph, and scantier in details than the requirements of a census-taker’s blank, may serve, with many other signs that one finds scattered among the pages of this author, to show his rare modesty and effacement of his physical self.  He seems, like some other thoughtful and sensitive natures before and since, averse or at least indifferent to being put on record as an eating, digesting, sleeping, and clothes-wearing animal, of that species of which his contemporary Sir Samuel Pepys stands as the classical instance, and which the newspaper interviewer of our own day—­that “fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judgment”—­has trained to the most noxious degree of offensiveness.

[Illustration:  SIR THOMAS BROWNE]

Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select company—­“fit audience though few”—­who are students of the ’Religio Medici’ to a close intimacy with his highest mental processes and conditions, his “separable accidents,” affairs of assimilation and secretion as one may say, were business between himself and his grocer and tailor, his cook and his laundress.

The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 produced the completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the literary remains of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources—­his own note-books, domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions of contemporary writers and the works of subsequent biographers—­all that we are likely, this side of Paradise, to know of this great scholar and admirable man.

The main facts of his life are as follows.  He was born in the Parish of St. Michael’s Cheap, in London, on the 19th of October, 1605 (the year of the Gunpowder Plot).  His father, as is apologetically admitted by a granddaughter, Mrs. Littleton, “was a tradesman, a mercer, though a gentleman of a good family in Cheshire” (generosa familia, says Sir Thomas’s own epitaph).  That he was the parent of his son’s temperament, a devout man with a leaning toward mysticism in religion, is shown by the charming story Mrs. Littleton tells of him, exhibiting traits worthy of the best ages of faith, and more to be expected in the father of a mediaeval saint than in a prosperous Cheapside mercer, whose son was to be one of the most learned and philosophical physicians of the age of Harvey and Sydenham:—­“His father used to open his breast when he was asleep and kiss it in prayers over him, as ’tis said of Origen’s father, that the Holy Ghost would take possession there.”  Clearly, it was with reverent memory of this good man that Sir Thomas, near the close of his own long life, wrote:—­“Among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up one hand unto heaven that thou wert born of honest parents; that modesty, humility, patience, and veracity lay in the same egg and came into the world with thee.”