habits, and hopes in all ages of his existence on this earth. And the
eloquence and splendour of this wonderful piece is as arresting to the
student of style as its immense information is to the scholar and the
antiquarian. 'The conclusion of the essay on Urn-Burial,' says Carlyle,
'is absolutely beautiful: a still elegiac mood, so soft, so deep, so
solemn and tender, like the song of some departed saint--an echo of
deepest meaning from the great and mighty Nations of the Dead. Sir
Thomas Browne must have been a good man.'

_The Garden of Cyrus_ is past all description of mine. '_The Garden of
Cyrus_ must be read. It is an extravagant sport of a scholar of the
first rank and a genius of the first water. 'We write no herbal,' he
begins, and neither he does. And after the most fantastical prose-poem
surely that ever was written, he as fantastically winds up at midnight
with this: 'To keep our eyes longer open were but to act our antipodes.
The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first
sleep in Persia.' At which Coleridge must incontinently whip out his
pencil till we have this note of his on the margin: 'What life! what
fancy! what whimsicality! Was ever such a reason given for leaving one's
book and going to bed as this, that they are already past their first
sleep in Persia, and that the huntsmen are up in America?'

Sir Thomas Browne has had many admirers, and his greatest admirers are to
be found among our foremost men. He has had Samuel Johnson among his
greatest admirers, and Coleridge, and Carlyle, and Hazlitt, and Lytton,
and Walter Pater, and Leslie Stephen, and Professor Saintsbury; than whom
no one of them all has written better on Browne. And he has had princely
editors and annotators in Simon Wilkin, and Dr. Greenhill, and Dr. Lloyd
Roberts. I must leave it to those eminent men to speak to you with all
their authority about Sir Thomas Browne's ten talents: his unique natural