en absurd.

There can be little doubt that this strongly marked taste for curious
details was one of the symptoms of the scientific bent of his mind. For
Browne was scientific just up to the point where the examination of
detail ends, and its coordination begins. He knew little or nothing of
general laws; but his interest in isolated phenomena was intense. And
the more singular the phenomena, the more he was attracted. He was
always ready to begin some strange inquiry. He cannot help wondering:
'Whether great-ear'd persons have short necks, long feet, and loose
bellies?' 'Marcus Antoninus Philosophus,' he notes in his commonplace
book, 'wanted not the advice of the best physicians; yet how warrantable
his practice was, to take his repast in the night, and scarce anything
but treacle in the day, may admit of great doubt.' To inquire thus is,
perhaps, to inquire too curiously; yet such inquiries are the stuff of
which great scientific theories are made. Browne, however, used his love
of details for another purpose: he co-ordinated them, not into a
scientific theory, but into a work of art. His method was one which, to
be successful, demanded a self-confidence, an imagination, and a
technical power, possessed by only the very greatest artists. Everyone
knows Pascal's overwhelming sentence:--'Le silence eternel de ces
espaces infinis m'effraie.' It is overwhelming, obviously and
immediately; it, so to speak, knocks one down. Browne's ultimate object
was to create some such tremendous effect as that, by no knock-down
blow, but by a multitude of delicate, subtle, and suggestive touches, by
an elaborate evocation of memories and half-hidden things, by a
mysterious combination of pompous images and odd unexpected trifles
drawn together from the ends of the earth and the four quarters of
heaven. His success gives him a place beside Webster and Blake, on one
of the very highest peaks of Parnassus. And, if not the highest of all,
Browne's peak is--or so at least it seems from the plains below--more
difficult of access than some which are no less exalted. The road skirts
the precipice the whole way. If one fails in the style of Pascal, one is
merely flat; if one fails in the style of Browne, one is ridiculous. He
who plays with the void, who dallies with eternity, who leaps from star
to star, is in danger at every moment of being swept into utter limbo,
and tossed forever in the Paradise of Fools.

Browne produced his greatest wor