Notwithstanding such objurgations, some have supposed that the style of Johnson, perhaps without conscious intent, was founded upon that of Browne.  A tone of oracular authority, an academic Latinism sometimes disregarding the limitations of the unlearned reader, an elaborate balancing of antitheses in the same period,—­these are qualities which the two writers have in common.  But the resemblance, such as it is, is skin-deep.  Johnson is a polemic by nature, and at his best cogent and triumphant in argument.  His thought is carefully kept level with the apprehension of the ordinary reader, while arrayed in a verbal pomp simulating the expression of something weighty and profound.  Browne is intuitive and ever averse to controversy, feeling, as he exquisitely says, that “many have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.  A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.”  Calmly philosophic, he writes for kindred minds, and his concepts satisfying his own intellect, he delivers them with as little passion as an AEolian harp answering the wind, and lingers not for applause or explanation.  His being

     “Those thoughts that wander through eternity,”

he means that we too shall “have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch.”

How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as verse.

“Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;” “When personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:”—­such passages as these, and the whole of the ‘Fragment on Mummies,’ one can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.

That the ‘Religio Medici’ was the work of a gentleman before his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, “I have shaken hands with delight [sc. by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days.”  So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind.  Its frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne’s:  if Montaigne had been graduated after a due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the fluctus decumanus gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would have been closer.