* * * * *

The _Letter to a Friend_ is an account of the swift and inevitable
deathbed of one of Sir Thomas's patients: a young man who died of a
deceitful but a galloping consumption. There is enough of old medical
observation and opening science in the _Letter_, as well as of sweet old
literature, and still sweeter old religion, to make it a classic to every
well-read doctor in the language. 'To be dissolved and to be with Christ
was his dying ditty. He esteemed it enough to approach the years of his
Saviour, who so ordered His own human state, as not to be old upon earth.
He that early arriveth into the parts and prudence of age is happily old
without the uncomfortable attendants of it. And 'tis superfluous to live
unto grey hairs, when in a precocious temper we anticipate the virtues of
them. In brief, he cannot be accounted young who outliveth the old man.'
Let all young medical students have by heart Sir Thomas Browne's
incomparable English, and wisdom, and piety in his _Letter to a Friend
upon the occasion of the death of his intimate Friend_. 'This unique
morsel of literature' as Walter Pater calls it.

The _Vulgar Errors_, it must be confessed, is neither very inviting, nor
very rewarding to ordinary readers nowadays. And that big book will only
be persevered in to the end by those readers to whom everything that Sir
Thomas Browne has written is of a rare interest and profit. The full
title of this now completely antiquated and wholly forgotten treatise is
this, '_Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, or Enquiries into very many received
Tenets and commonly presumed Truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and
Common Errors.' The First Book of the _Pseudodoxia_ is general and
philosophical; the Second Book treats of popular and received tenets
concerning mineral and vegetable bodies; the Third, of popular and
received tenets concerning animals; the Fourth, of man; the Fifth, of