[128] never have the good luck to find in any more formal
kind of literature.

It is, in truth, to the literary purpose of the humourist, in the
old-fashioned sense of the term, that this method of writing naturally
allies itself--of the humourist to whom all the world is but a
spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly
a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that
are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out
especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in
the things or the people around him. Certainly, in an age stirred by
great causes, like the age of Browne in England, of Montaigne in
France, that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men of
letters. Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel
(its eager interest in those great causes turning sour on occasion) the
character of the humourist may well find its proper influence, through
that serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving second
thoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fierce
wills around it. Something of such a humourist was Browne--not callous
to men and their fortunes; certainly not without opinions of his own
about them; and yet, undisturbed by the civil war, by the fall, and
then the restoration, of the monarchy, through that long quiet life
(ending at last on the day [129] himself had predicted, as if at the
moment he had willed) in which "all existence," as he says, "had been
but food for contemplation."

Johnson, in beginning his Life of Browne, remarks that Browne "seems to
have had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising little
curiosity after their private life." Whether or not, with the example
of Johnson himself before us, we can think just that, it is certain
that Browne's works are of a kind to directly stimulate curiosity about
himself--about himself, as being manifestly so large a part of those
works; and as a matter of fact we know a great deal about his life,
uneventful as in truth it was. To himself, indeed, his life at
Norwich, as he gives us to understand, seemed wonderful enough. "Of
these wonders," says Johnson, "the view that can now be taken of his
life offers no appearance." But "we carry with us," as Browne writes,
"the wonders we seek without us," and we may note on the other hand, a
circumstance which his daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, tells us of his
chi