dicious knowledge
shall be employed, not to traduce or extenuate, but to explain and
dilucidate, to add and ampliate, according to the laudable custom of the
ancients in their sober promotions of learning. Unto whom,
notwithstanding, we shall not contentiously rejoin, or only to justify
our own, but to applaud or confirm his maturer assertions; and shall
confer what is in us unto his name and honour; ready, for our part, to be
swallowed up in any worthy enlarger: as having our aid, if any way, or
under any name, we may obtain a work, so much desired, and yet
desiderated, of truth.' Shall this Association, I wonder, raise up from
among its members, such a worthy successor and enlarger of Sir Thomas
Browne?

The title, at least, of the _Urn-Burial_ is more familiar to the most of
us than that of the _Pseudodoxia_. It was the chance discovery of some
ancient urns in Norfolk that furnished Sir Thomas with the occasion to
write his _Hydriotaphia_. And that classical book is only another
illustration of his enormous reading, ready memory, and intense interest
in everything that touches on the nature of man, and on his beliefs,
habits, and hopes in all ages of his existence on this earth. And the
eloquence and splendour of this wonderful piece is as arresting to the
student of style as its immense information is to the scholar and the
antiquarian. 'The conclusion of the essay on Urn-Burial,' says Carlyle,
'is absolutely beautiful: a still elegiac mood, so soft, so deep, so
solemn and tender, like the song of some departed saint--an echo of
deepest meaning from the great and mighty Nations of the Dead. Sir
Thomas Browne must have been a good man.'

_The Garden of Cyrus_ is past all description of mine. '_The Garden of
Cyrus_ must be read. It is an extravagant sport of a scholar of the
first rank and a genius of the first water. 'We write no herbal,' he
begins, and neither he does. And after the most fantastical prose-poem
surely that ever was written, he as fantastically winds up at midnight
with this: 'To keep our eyes longer open were but to act our antipodes.
The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first
sleep in Persia.' At which Coleridge must incontinently whip out his
pencil till we have this note of his on the margin: 'What life! what
fancy! what whimsicality! Was ever such a reason given for leaving one's
book and going to bed as this, that they are already past their first
sleep