“The ‘Religio Medici,’” says Coleridge, “is a fine portrait of a handsome man in his best clothes.”  There is truth in the criticism, and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true.  Who does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden, that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?

This aloofness of Browne’s, which holds him apart “in the still air of delightful studies,” is no affectation; it is an innate quality.  He thinks his thoughts in his own way, and “the style is the man” never more truly than with him.  One of his family letters mentions the execution of Charles I. as a “horrid murther,” and another speaks of Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the public eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultuous and heroic period of English history.  Not a word shows that Shakespeare was of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the parallels in their thought and feeling and in his, were his contemporaries.  Constant and extensive as are his excursions into ancient literature, it is rare for him to make any reference to writers of his own time.

Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great names of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries.  His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of our modern school:—­“What is the use of dew-claws in dogs?” He does not instantly answer, as a schoolboy in this Darwinian day would, “To carry out an analogy;” but the mere asking of the question sets him ahead of his age.  See too his curious inquiries into the left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and squirrels.  The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value:  “his piece ‘De Circul.  Sang.,’ which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus.”  And here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur—­concerning canine madness, “whether it holdeth not better at second than at first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the evil proves less considerable.”  He is the first to observe and describe that curious product of the decomposition of flesh known to modern chemists as adipocere.

He is full of eager anticipation of the future.  “Join sense unto reason,” he cries, “and experiment unto speculation, and so give life unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos....  What libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few ages may joyfully declare.”

But acute and active as our author’s perceptions were, they did not prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to the devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part in the economy of the world.  This belief affords so easy a solution of some problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may look back with envy upon those who held it in serene and comfortable possession.