The Major Works (English Library) by Sir Thomas Browne

as if by anticipation of the counsel of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus that the artist should remain ‘within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’. 59 This is not to say that we are not conscious of a definite personality in each of Browne’s works. Indeed we are; but that personality is by no means identical with Dr Browne of Norwich, witness his express reminder that he was ever ‘above
Atlas
his shoulders’ (as before, p. 22). The implied principle must have proved an awesome burden, for it meant the subordination of his personal tragedies to his artistic integrity, even such harrowing tragedies as the deaths of eight of his twelve children. It may well be that to be vexed by contraries, as Donne was, defines the human condition; but to experience those contraries and yet transcend them, is no less an accurate definition of that condition. Browne had seen the devil at high noon and averted his gaze because as an artist he trusted that the worst might return to laughter.
    We protest because such a vision appears to negate reality. But where we might be obsessed with the problem of evil, and pain, Sir Thomas Browne explored with eager thought the equally complex problem of the existence of goodness, and joy. The diverse masks he assumes in his various works while playing ‘in one person many people’, confirm through their common protagonist the central role he allotted to ‘recreation’. So far, certainly, it could be said of Browne’s prose what Robert Frost claimed of the figure a poem makes: ‘it begins in delight and ends in wisdom’. The figure, Frost added, is the same as for love.

Facsimile of the title page of the 1643 edition of
Religio Medici

Religio Medici
    [Composed in the mid-1630s,
Religio Medici
– ‘The Religion of a Physician’ – was first published in an unauthorised edition in 1642 (hereinafter abbreviated as
UA
) and in an authorised one in 1643. See also the discussion above, pp. 23 ff.; and for further bibliographical details: below, p. 551 .
    The editions of 1642 and 1643 have the same engraved title page, save that the authorised edition carries the additional statement ‘A true and full coppy…’ etc. The engraving shows a man falling headlong from a rock into the sea; but his fall is arrested by a hand issuing from the clouds, confirming the man’s exclamation
à cælo salus
(‘from heaven, salvation’). The engraver was William Marshall, who had already ventured the portraits for Donne’s
Devotions
(1643), Shakespeare’s
Poems
(1640), and Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning
(1640), even as he later did the portraits of Milton for the Minor Poems (1645) and Charles I for the frontispiece of
Eikon Basilike
attributed to the executed monarch (1649).]

TO THE READER
    Would Truth dispense, we could be content, with Plato, that knowledge were but Remembrance; that Intellectuall acquisition were but Reminiscentiall evocation, and new impressions but the colourishing of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before. For, what is worse, knowledge is made by oblivion; and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much we know. Our tender Enquiries taking up Learning at large, and together with true and assured notions, receiving many, wherein our reviewing judgements doe finde no satisfaction; and therefore in this Encyclopædie and round of knowledge, like the great and exemplary wheeles of heaven, we must observe two Circles: that while we are daily carried about, and whirled on by the swinge and rapt of the one, we may maintain a naturall and proper course, in the slow and sober wheele of the other. And this we shall more readily perform, if we timely survey our knowledge; impartially singling out those encroachments, which junior compliance and popular credulity hath admitted. Whereof at present we have endeavoured a long and serious
Adviso;
proposing not only a