He was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where his monument still claims regard as chief among the memorabilia of that noble sanctuary[3].

[Footnote 3:  In the course of repairs, “in August, 1840, his coffin was broken open by a pickaxe; the bones were found in good preservation, the fine auburn hair had not lost its freshness.”  It is painful to relate that the cranium was removed and placed in the pathological museum of the Norwich Hospital, labeled as “the gift of” some person (name not recalled), whose own cranium is probably an object of interest solely to its present proprietor.  “Who knows the fate of his own bones? ...  We insult not over their ashes,” says Sir Thomas.  The curator of the museum feels that he has a clever joke on the dead man, when with a grin he points to a label bearing these words from the ’Hydriotaphia’:—­“To be knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials.”]

At the first appearance of Browne’s several publications, they attracted that attention from the learned and thoughtful which they have ever since retained.  The ‘Religio Medici’ was soon translated into several modern languages as well as into Latin, and became the subject of curiously diverse criticism.  The book received the distinction of a place in the Roman ‘Index Expurgatorius,’ while from various points of view its author was regarded as a Romanist, an atheist, a deist, a pantheist, and as bearing the number 666 somewhere about him.

A worthy Quaker, a fellow-townsman, was so impressed by his tone of quietistic mysticism that he felt sure the philosophic doctor was guided by “the inward light,” and wrote, sending a godly book, and proposing to clinch his conversion in a personal interview.  Such are the perils that environ the man who not only repeats a creed in sincerity, but ventures to do and to utter his own thinking about it.

From Browne’s own day to the present time his critics and commentators have been numerous and distinguished; one of the most renowned among them being Dr. Johnson, whose life of the author, prefixed to an edition of the ‘Christian Morals’ in 1756, is a fine specimen of that facile and effective hack-work of which Johnson was master.  In that characteristic way of his, half of patronage, half of reproof, and wholly pedagogical, he summons his subject to the bar of his dialectics, and according to his lights administers justice.  He admits that Browne has “great excellencies” and “uncommon sentiments,” and that his scholarship and science are admirable, but strongly condemns his style:  “It is vigorous, but rugged; it is learned, but pedantic; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure; his tropes are harsh and his combinations uncouth.”

Behemoth prescribing rules of locomotion to the swan!  By how much would English letters have been the poorer if Browne had learned his art of Johnson!