it, he was not so ambitious as to challenge the
honour thereof, as having no hand in that work [85]."

In 1658, the discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk gave him
occasion to write Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or a Discourse of
sepulchral Urns; in which he treats, with his usual learning, on the
funeral rites of the ancient nations; exhibits their various treatment
of the dead; and examines the substances found in his Norfolcian urns.
There is, perhaps, none of his works which better exemplifies his
reading or memory. It is scarcely to be imagined, how many particulars
he has amassed together, in a treatise which seems to have been
occasionally written; and for which, therefore, no materials could
have been previously collected. It is, indeed, like other treatises of
antiquity, rather for curiosity than use; for it is of small
importance to know which nation buried their dead in the ground, which
threw them into the sea, or which gave them to birds and beasts; when
the practice of cremation began, or when it was disused; whether the
bones of different persons were mingled in the same urn; what
oblations were thrown into the pyre; or how the ashes of the body were
distinguished from those of other substances. Of the uselessness of
these inquiries, Browne seems not to have been ignorant; and,
therefore, concludes them with an observation which can never be too
frequently recollected:

"All, or most apprehensions, rested in opinions of some future being,
which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those perverted
conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which christians pity or laugh at.
Happy are they, which live not in that disadvantage of time, when men
could say little for futurity, but from reason; whereby the noblest
mind fell often upon doubtful deaths, and melancholy dissolutions:
with these hopes Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits against the cold
potion; and Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of
the night in reading the immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his
wavering hand unto the animosity of that attempt.

"It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell
him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state
to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in
vain: without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire
of such a state were but a fallacy in nature: unsatisfied
considerators would quarrel at the justness of th