He had separated the materials of other creatures, there
consequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls of
man, He was driven to a second and harder creation--of a substance like
Himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul.

There, we have the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression of
his mind!--minute and curious in its thinking; but with an effect, on
the sudden, of a real sublimity or depth. His style is certainly an
unequal one. It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhaps
influenced, Johnson--a dignity that can be attained only in such mental
calm as follows long and learned pondering on the high subjects Browne
loves to deal with. It has its garrulity, its various levels of
painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together
with much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy
summer afternoon down at Norwich. And all is so oddly mixed, showing,
in its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort of
literature he represents, really stood in need of technique, [127] of a
formed taste in literature, of a literary architecture.

And yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different, in him, any
more than in the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similar
writers of that age--mental abodes, we might liken, after their own
manner, to the little old private houses of some historic town grouped
about its grand public structures, which, when they have survived at
all, posterity is loth to part with. For, in their absolute sincerity,
not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves ("the unique
peculiarity of the writer's mind," being, as Johnson says of Browne,
"faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work") but, even
more than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and
reflect, the age they lived in. In essentials, of course, even Browne
is by no means so unique among his contemporaries, and so singular, as
he looks. And then, as the very condition of their work, there is an
entire absence of personal restraint in dealing with the public, whose
humours they come at last in a great measure to reproduce. To speak
more properly, they have no sense of a "public" to deal with, at
all--only a full confidence in the "friendly reader," as they love to
call him. Hence their amazing pleasantry, their indulgence in their
own conceits; but hence also those unpremeditated wildflowers of speech
we should