ms to have
had no complaint to make of his stepfather, Sir Thomas Dutton. This
stepfather may at least possibly have been the hero of the duel with Sir
Hatton Cheeke, which Mr. Carlyle has made famous. With him Browne visited
Ireland, having previously been brought up at Winchester and at Broadgates
Hall, which became, during his own residence, Pembroke College, at Oxford.
Later he made the usual grand tour. Then he took medical degrees; practised
it is said, though on no very precise evidence, both in Oxfordshire and
Yorkshire; settled, why is not known, at Norwich; married in 1641 Dorothy
Mileham, a lady of good family in his adopted county; was a steady Royalist
through the troubles; acquired a great name for medical and scientific
knowledge, though he was not a Fellow of the Royal Society; was knighted by
Charles II. in 1662, and died in 1682. His first literary appearance had
been made forty years earlier in a way very common in French literary
history, but so uncommon in English as to have drawn from Johnson a rather
unwontedly illiberal sneer. At a time unknown, but by his own account
before his thirtieth year (therefore before 1635), Browne had written the
_Religio Medici_. It was, according to the habit of the time, copied and
handed about in MS. (there exist now five MS. copies showing remarkable
differences with each other and the printed copies), and in 1642 it got
into print. A copy was sent by Lord Dorset to the famous Sir Kenelm Digby,
then under confinement for his opinions, and the husband of Venetia wrote
certain not very forcible and not wholly complimentary remarks which, as
Browne was informed, were at once put to press. A correspondence ensued,
and Browne published an authorised copy, in which perhaps a little
"economy" might be noticed. The book made an extraordinary impression, and
was widely translated and commented on in foreign languages, though its
vogue was purely due to its intrinsic merits, and not at all to the
circumstances which enabled Milton (rather arrogantly and not with absolute
truth) to boast that "Europe rang from side to side" with his defence of
the execution of Charles I. Four years later, in 1646, Browne published his
largest and in every sense most popular book, the _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_
or _Enquiry into Vulgar Errors_. Twelve more years passed before the
greatest, from a literary point of view, of his works, the _Hydriotaphia_
or _Urn-Burial_,--a magnificent descant on the