s unto those to come, as they unto us at present."
That, surely, coming from one both by temperament and habit so great an
antiquary, has the touch of something like an influence in the
atmosphere of the time. That there was any actual connexion between
Browne's work and Bacon's is but a surmise. Yet we almost seem to hear
Bacon when Browne discourses on the "use of doubts, and the advantages
which might be derived from drawing up a calendar of doubts,
falsehoods, and popular errors;" and, as from Bacon, one gets the
impression that men really have been very much the prisoners of their
own crude or pedantic terms, notions, associations; that they have been
very indolent in testing very simple matters--with a wonderful kind of
"supinity," as he calls it. In Browne's chapter on the "Sources of
Error," again, we may trace much resemblance to Bacon's striking
doctrine of the Idola, the "shams" men fall down and worship. Taking
source respectively, from the "common infirmity of human nature," from
the "erroneous disposition of the people," from "confident adherence to
authority," the errors which Browne chooses to deal with may be
registered as identical with Bacon's Idola Tribus, Fori, Theatri; the
idols of our common human nature; of the vulgar, when they get
together; and of the learned, when they get together.

[149] But of the fourth species of error noted by Bacon, the Idola
Specus, the Idols of the Cave, that whole tribe of illusions, which are
"bred amongst the weeds and tares of one's own brain," Browne tells us
nothing by way of criticism; was himself, rather, a lively example of
their operation. Throw those illusions, those "idols," into concrete
or personal form, suppose them introduced among the other forces of an
active intellect, and you have Sir Thomas Browne himself. The
sceptical inquirer who rises from his cathartic, his purging of error,
a believer in the supernatural character of pagan oracles, and a cruel
judge of supposed witches, must still need as much as ever that
elementary conception of the right method and the just limitations of
knowledge, by power of which he should not just strain out a single
error here or there, but make a final precipitate of fallacy.

And yet if the temperament had been deducted from Browne's work--that
inherent and strongly marked way of deciding things, which has guided
with so surprising effect the musings of the Letter to a Friend, and
the Urn-Burial--we should