im despise all dangers. In and after all
sea-fights, I have been very thirsty.

He died, as I said, early in life. We only hear of him later in
connexion with a trait of character observed in Tom the grandson, whose
winning ways, and tricks of bodily and mental growth, are duly recorded
in these letters: the reader will, I hope, pardon the following
extracts from them:--

Little Tom is lively.... Frank is fayne sometimes to play him asleep
with a fiddle. When we send away our letters he scribbles a paper and
will have it sent to his sister, and saith she doth not know how many
fine things there are in Norwich.... He delights his grandfather when
he comes home.

Tom gives you many thanks for his clothes (from London). He has
appeared very fine this King's day with them.

Tom presents his duty. A gentleman at our election asked Tom who hee
was for? and he answered, "For all four." The gentleman replied that
he answered like a physician's son.

Tom would have his grandmother, his aunt Betty, and Frank, valentines:
but hee conditioned with them that they should give him nothing of any
kind that hee had ever had or seen before.

[144] "Tom is just now gone to see two bears which are to be shown."
"Tom, his duty. He is begging books and reading of them." "The
players are at the Red Lion hard by; and Tom goes sometimes to see a
play."

And then one day he stirs old memories--

The fairings were welcome to Tom. He finds about the house divers
things that were your brother's (the late Edward's), and Betty
sometimes tells him stories about him, so that he was importunate with
her to write his life in a quarter of a sheet of paper, and read it
unto him, and will have still more added.

Just as I am writing (learnedly about a comet, 7th January 1680-81) Tom
comes and tells me the blazing star is in the yard, and calls me to see
it. It was but dim, and the sky not clear.... I am very sensible of
this sharp weather.+

He seems to have come to no good end, riding forth one stormy night.
Requiescat in pace!

Of this long, leisurely existence the chief events were Browne's rare
literary publications; some of his writings indeed having been left
unprinted till after his death; while in the circumstances of the issue
of every one of them there is something accidental, as if the world
might have missed it altogether. Even the Discourse of Vulgar Errors,
the longest and most elaborate of his works, is entirely d