riend Whitefoot. One may see even a kind of felicity in his
death, falling exactly on the completion of his seventy-seventh year.

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