r Thomas's favourite
Father, has supplied us, as it seems to me, with his whole life and
character in these so expressive and so comprehensive words of his,
_Anima naturaliter Christiana_. In these three words, when well weighed
and fully opened up, we have the whole author of the _Religio Medici_,
the _Christian Morals_, and the _Letter to a Friend. Anima naturaliter
Christiana_.

* * * * *

The _Religio Medici_ was Sir Thomas Browne's first book, and it remains
by far his best book. His other books acquire their value and take their
rank just according to the degree of their 'affinity' to the _Religio
Medici_. Sir Thomas Browne is at his best when he is most alone with
himself. There is no subject that interests him so much as Sir Thomas
Browne. And if you will forget yourself in Sir Thomas Browne, and in his
conversations which he holds with himself, you will find a rare and an
ever fresh delight in the _Religio Medici_. Sir Thomas is one of the
greatest egotists of literature--to use a necessary but an unpopular and
a misleading epithet. Hazlitt has it that there have only been but three
perfect, absolute, and unapproached egotists in all literature--Cellini,
Montaigne, and Wordsworth. But why that fine critic leaves out Sir
Thomas Browne, I cannot understand or accept. I always turn to Sir
Thomas Browne, far more than to either of Hazlitt's canonised three, when
I want to read what a great man has to tell me about himself: and in this
case both a great and a good and a Christian man. And thus, whatever
modification and adaptation may have been made in this masterpiece of
his, in view of its publication, and after it was first published, the
original essence, most genuine substance, and unique style of the book
were all intended for its author's peculiar heart and private eye alone.
And thus it is that we have a work of a simplicity and a sincerity that
would have been impossible had its author in any part of his book sat
down to compose for the public. Sir Thomas Browne lived so much within
himself, that he was both secret writer and sole reader to himself. His
great book is 'a private exercise directed solely,' as he himself says,
'to himself: it is a memorial addressed to himself rather than an example
or a rule directed to any other man.' And it is only he who opens the
_Religio Medici_ honestly and easily believing that, and glad to have
such a secret and sincere and devout book in his hand,--it