iscursive and
occasional, coming to an end with no natural conclusion, but only
because the writer chose to leave off just there; and few probably have
been the readers of the book as a consecutive whole. At times indeed we
seem to have in it observations only, or notes, preliminary to some
more orderly composition. Dip into it: read, for [145] instance, the
chapter "Of the Ring-finger," or the chapters "Of the Long Life of the
Deer," and on the "Pictures of Mermaids, Unicorns, and some Others,"
and the part will certainly seem more than the whole. Try to read it
through, and you will soon feel cloyed;--miss very likely, its real
worth to the fancy, the literary fancy (which finds its pleasure in
inventive word and phrase) and become dull to the really vivid beauties
of a book so lengthy, but with no real evolution. Though there are
words, phrases, constructions innumerable, which remind one how much
the work initiated in France by Madame de Rambouillet--work, done for
England, we may think perhaps imperfectly, in the next century by
Johnson and others--was really needed; yet the capacities of Browne's
manner of writing, coming as it did so directly from the man, are felt
even in his treatment of matters of science. As with Buffon, his full,
ardent, sympathetic vocabulary, the poetry of his language, a poetry
inherent in its elementary particles--the word, the epithet--helps to
keep his eye, and the eye of the reader, on the object before it, and
conduces directly to the purpose of the naturalist, the observer. But,
only one half observation, its other half consisting of very
out-of-the-way book-lore, this work displays Browne still in the
character of the antiquary, as that age understood him. He is a kind
of Elias Ashmole, but dealing with natural objects; which are for him,
in the first [146] place, and apart from the remote religious hints and
intimations they carry with them, curiosities. He seems to have no
true sense of natural law, as Bacon understood it; nor even of that
immanent reason in the natural world, which the Platonic tradition
supposes. "Things are really true," he says, "as they correspond unto
God's conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity
unto that intellect, in whose idea they had their first
determinations." But, actually, what he is busy in the record of, are
matters more or less of the nature of caprices; as if things, after
all, were significant of their higher ve