He could never "hear the Ave Mary! bell without an
oraison." At a solemn procession he has "wept abundantly." How
English, in truth, all this really is! It reminds one how some of the
most popular of English writers, in many a half-conscious expression,
have witnessed to a susceptibility in the English mind itself, in spite
of the Reformation, to what is affecting in religious ceremony. Only,
in religion as in politics, Browne had no turn for disputes; was
suspicious of them, indeed; knowing, as he says with true acumen, that
"a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be
forced to surrender," even in controversies not [132] necessarily
maladroit--an image in which we may trace a little contemporary
colouring.

The Enquiries into Vulgar Errors appeared in the year 1646; a year
which found him very hard on "the vulgar." His suspicion, in the
abstract, of what Bacon calls Idola Fori, the Idols of the
Market-place, takes a special emphasis from the course of events about
him: "being erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together,
they will be error itself." And yet, congruously with a dreamy
sweetness of character we may find expressed in his very features, he
seems not greatly concerned at the temporary suppression of the
institutions he values so much. He seems to possess some inward
Platonic reality of them--church or monarchy--to hold by in idea, quite
beyond the reach of Roundhead or unworthy Cavalier. In the power of
what is inward and inviolable in his religion, he can still take note:
"In my solitary and retired imagination (neque enim cum porticus aut me
lectulus accepit, desum mihi) I remember I am not alone, and therefore
forget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is ever with me."

His father, a merchant of London, with some claims to ancient descent,
left him early in possession of ample means. Educated at Winchester
and Oxford, he visited Ireland, France, and Italy; and in the year
1633, at the age of twenty-eight, became Doctor of Medicine at Leyden.
Three years later he established himself as a physician [133] at
Norwich for the remainder of his life, having married a lady, described
as beautiful and attractive, and affectionate also, as we may judge
from her letters and postscripts to those of her husband, in an
orthography of a homeliness amazing even for that age. Dorothy Browne
bore him ten children, six of whom he survived.

Their house at Norwic