Browne settled at Norwich, being then about thirty-six years
old, he had already completed the Religio Medici; a desultory
collection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends,
at all events with no purpose of immediate publication. It had been
lying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his own
extraordinarily perplexed manuscript, or in manuscript copies, when, in
1642, an incorrect printed version from one of those copies, "much
corrupted by transcription at various hands," appeared anonymously.
Browne, decided royalist as he was in spite of seeming indifference,
connects this circumstance with the unscrupulous use of the press for
political purposes, and especially against the king, at that time.
Just here a romantic figure comes on the scene. Son of the unfortunate
young Everard Digby who perished on the scaffold for some half-hearted
participation in the Gunpowder Plot, Kenelm Digby, brought up in the
reformed religion, had returned in manhood to the religion of his
father. In his intellectual composition he had, in common with Browne,
a scientific interest, oddly tinged with both poetry and scepticism: he
had also a strong sympathy with religious reaction, and a more than
sentimental love for a seemingly vanishing age of faith, which he, for
one, would not think of as vanishing. A copy of that surreptitious
edition of the Religio Medici found him a prisoner on suspicion of a
too active [136] royalism, and with much time on his hands.

The Roman Catholic, although, secure in his definite orthodoxy, he
finds himself indifferent on many points (on the reality of witchcraft,
for instance) concerning which Browne's more timid, personally grounded
faith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, to
detect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole much
attracted him, and hastily put forth his "animadversions" upon it.
Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself
committed to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of
the Religio Medici published at last with his name. There have been
many efforts to formulate the "religion of the layman," which might be
rightly understood, perhaps, as something more than what is called
"natural," yet less than ecclesiastical, or "professional" religion.
Though its habitual mode of conceiving experience is on a different
plane, yet it would recognise the legitimacy of the traditional
religious