In 1636 he removed to Norwich and permanently established himself there in the practice of physic.  There in 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham, a lady of good family in Norfolk; thereby not only improving his social connections, but securing a wife “of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism.”  Such at least was the view of an intimate friend of more than forty years, Rev. John Whitefoot, in the ‘Minutes’ which, at the request of the widow, he drew up after Sir Thomas’s death, and which contain the most that is known of his personal appearance and manners.  Evidently the marriage was a happy one for forty-one years, when the Lady Dorothy was left maestissima conjux, as her husband’s stately epitaph, rich with many an issimus, declares.  Twelve children were born of it; and though only four of them survived their parents, such mortality in carefully tended and well-circumstanced families was less remarkable than it would be now, when two centuries more of progress in medical science have added security and length to human life.

The good mother—­had she not endeared herself to the modern reader by the affectionate gentleness and the quaint glimpses of domestic life that her family letters reveal—­would be irresistible by the ingeniously bad spelling in which she reveled, transgressing even the wide limits then allowed to feminine heterography.

It is noteworthy that Dr. Browne’s professional prosperity was not impaired by the suspicion which early attached to him, and soon deepened into conviction, that he was addicted to literary pursuits.  He was in high repute as a physician.  His practice was extensive, and he was diligent in it, as also in those works of literature and scientific investigation which occupied all “snatches of time,” he says, “as medical vacations and the fruitless importunity of uroscopy would permit.”  His large family was liberally reared; his hospitality and his charities were ample.

In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose of all his productions:  the ’Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors’ the work evidently of the horae subsecivae of many years.  In 1658 he gave to the public two smaller but important and most characteristic works, ‘Hydriotaphia’ and ‘The Garden of Cyrus.’  Beside these publications he left many manuscripts which appeared posthumously; the most important of them, for its size and general interest, being ‘Christian Morals.’

When Sir Thomas’s long life drew to its close, it was with all the blessings “which should accompany old age.”  His domestic life had been one of felicity.  His eldest and only surviving son, Edward Browne, had become a scholar after his father’s own heart; and though not inheriting his genius, was already renowned in London, one of the physicians to the King, and in a way to become, as afterward he did, President of the College of Physicians.  All his daughters who had attained womanhood had been well married.  He lived in the society of the honorable and learned, and had received from the King the honor of knighthood[1].