h, even then an old one it would seem, must have
grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of
antiquities--antiquities properly so called; his old Roman, or
Romanised British urns, from Walsingham or Brampton, for instance, and
those natural objects which he studied somewhat in the temper of a
curiosity-hunter or antiquary. In one of the old churchyards of
Norwich he makes the first discovery of adipocere, of which grim
substance "a portion still remains with him." For his multifarious
experiments he must have had his laboratory. The old window-stanchions
had become magnetic, proving, as he thinks, that iron "acquires
verticity" from long lying in one position. Once we find him re-tiling
the place. It was then, perhaps, that he made the observation that
bricks and tiles also acquire "magnetic alliciency"--one's whole house,
one might fancy; as indeed, he holds the earth itself to be a vast
lodestone.

The very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time it
costs his readers, that [134] slow Latinity which Johnson imitated from
him, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity will
abbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place. Yet he is by
no means indolent. Besides wide book-learning, experimental research
at home, and indefatigable observation in the open air, he prosecutes
the ordinary duties of a physician; contrasting himself indeed with
other students, "whose quiet and unmolested doors afford no such
distractions." To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen
studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they
did, upon death and decay. It is well, perhaps, that life should be
something of a "meditation upon death": but to many, certainly,
Browne's would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one's own
funeral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place--oftenest induces the
feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the
whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a
somewhat mortified kind. Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophic
apprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful
genius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those ugly
anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics,
there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one
day to reassert itself--stranger far than any fancied odylic
gravelights!

[135] When