Sir Thomas Browne was a noble illustration of Bacon's noble law. For Sir
Thomas carried all his studies, experiments, and operations to such a
depth in his own mind, and heart, and imagination, that he was able to
testify to all his fellow-physicians that he who studies man and medicine
deeply enough will meet with as many intellectual, and scientific, and
religious adventures every day as any traveller will meet with in Africa
itself. As a living man of genius in the medical profession, Dr. George
Gould, has it in that wonderful Behmenite and Darwinian book of his, _The
Meaning and the Method of Life_, 'A healing and a knitting wound,' he
argues, 'is quite as good a proof of God as a sensible mind would
desire.' This was Sir Thomas Browne's wise, and deep, and devout mind in
all parts of his professional and personal life. And he was man enough,
and a man of true science and of true religion enough, to warn his
brethren against those 'academical reservations' to which their strong
intellectual and professional pride, and their too weak faith and
courage, continually tempted them. Nor has he, for his part, any
clinical reservations in religion either, as so many of his brethren
have. 'I cannot go to cure the body of my patient,' he protests, 'but I
forget my profession and call unto God for his soul.' To call Sir Thomas
Browne sceptical, as has been a caprice and a fashion among his merely
literary admirers: and to say it, till it is taken for granted, that he
is an English Montaigne: all that is an abuse of language. It is, to all
but a small and select circle of writers and readers, utterly misleading
and essentially untrue. And, besides, it is right in the teeth of Sir
Thomas's own emphatic, and repeated, and indignant denial and repudiation
of Montaigne. Montaigne, with all his fascinations for literary men, and
they are great; and with all his services to them, and they are not
small; is both an immoral and an unbelieving writer. Whereas, Sir Thomas
Browne never wrote a single line, even in his greenest studies, that on
his deathbed he desired to blot out. A purer, a humbler, a more devout