Bishop. You are exchanged from a temporary to an eternal crown, a good exchange.

The king then said to the executioner, Is my hair well? and took off his cloak and his George, giving his George to the bishop, saying, Remember. Then he put off his doublet, and being in his wastcoat, he put his cloak on again; then looking upon the block, he said to the executioner, You must set it fast.

Executioner. It is fast, sir.

King. When I put my hands out this way-stretching them out-then do your work.

After that, having said two or three words (as he stood) to himself, with hands and eyes lift up, immediately stooping down, he laid his neck upon the block : and then the executioner again putting his hair under his cap, the king (thinking he had been going to strike) said, Stay for the sign.

:

Executioner. Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty. And after a very little pause, the king stretching forth his hands, the executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; the head being off, the executioner held it up, and shewed it to the people, which done, it was with the body put in a coffin covered with black velvet for that purpose, and conveyed into his lodgings at White Hall; and from thence it was carried to his house at Saint James's, where his body was embalmed and put in a coffin of lead, and laid there a fortnight to be seen by the people and on Wednesday seven-night after, his corps embalmed and coffin'd in lead, was delivered chiefly to the care of four of his servants, viz. Mr Herbert, Capt. Anthony Mildmay, his sewers, Captain Preston, and John Joyner (formerly cook to his Majesty), who with others in mourning, accompanied the herse that night to Windsor, and placed it in that which was formerly the kings bedchamber whence it was next day removed into the Deans Hall, and from thence by the Duke of Richmond, the Marquess of Hertford, the Marquess of Dorchester, and the Earl of Lindsey, conveyed to St George his chappel, and the corps there interred in the vault (as is supposed) of King Henry the VIII. and Queen Jane, with this inscription upon the coffin,

:

CHARLES KING OF ENGLAND.

M. DC. XL. VIII.

Apropos of the carp Izaak Walton quoted the Chronicle to this effect:

Hops and turkeys, carps and beer,
Came into England all in a year.

Sir William Dugdale (1605-86), antiquary, was born at Shustoke, near Coleshill, in Warwickshire. He studied law and history under his father, soon after whose death he purchased the neighbouring manor of Blythe (1625). Created Rouge Croix pursuivant (1640), he during the Great Rebellion adhered to the royalist cause, and from 1642 to 1646 was at Oxford, the king's headquarters, being made M.A. and Chester herald. He lived in obscurity during the Commonwealth, but on the Restoration received the office of Norroy, and in 1677 was promoted to be Garter Principal King of Arms and knight. His works are the Monasticon Anglicanum (1655– 61-73), a Latin history of English religious founda

tions (Eng. ed. 6 vols. 1817-30); Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656; 3d ed. 1763–65); History of St Paul's Cathedral (1658); History of Imbanking and Drayning (1662); Origines Juridiciales (1666); and Baronage of England (3 vols. 1675-76). See his Life, Diary, and Correspondence, edited by William Hamper (1827).

Elias Ashmole (1617–92), antiquary, was born at Lichfield, and became a solicitor, but, a hearty royalist, entered Brazenose College, Oxford, where he applied himself to mathematics, natural philosophy, astronomy, astrology, and alchemy. In 1646 he became acquainted with Lilly and other astrologers; and in 1650 he edited a work of Dr Dee's, to which he subjoined a treatise of his own. In 1652 he issued his Theatrum Chymicum, and in 1672 his magnum opus, a History of the Order of the Garter. At the Restoration various honours were conferred upon him, and thenceforward he mainly devoted himself to heraldic and antiquarian studies. In 1682 he presented to the University of Oxford a fine collection of rarities, bequeathed him by his old friend John Tradescant (1608-62), gardener to Charles I., which, originally the Museum Tradescantianum, was thereafter known as the Ashmolean Museum. Among his friends were Selden and Dugdale, whose daughter became his third wife. His Diary (1717) is entertaining.

Sir Thomas Browne,

the learned, desultory, eloquent writer of the Religio Medici, was born in London in 1605, and after being educated at Winchester and Oxford, travelled in Ireland, and also in France, Italy, and Holland. He took his doctor's degree at Leyden, and settled in 1637 as a medical practitioner at Norwich. He was knighted by Charles II. on his visit to Norwich in 1671. Browne's first and greatest work, Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician'), written about 1635, was published surreptitiously in 1642, and next year a perfect copy was issued by himself; this, his confession of faith, revealing a deep insight into the mysteries of the spiritual life, immediately rendered the author famous in the literary world. Here he gives a minute account of his opinions, not only on religion, but on an endless variety of philosophical and abstruse questions, besides affording the reader glimpses into the eccentricities of his personal character. The language of the work is bold and poetical, adorned with picturesque imagery, though frequently pedantic, rugged, and obscure. His most elaborate work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into ... Vulgar Errors, appeared in 1646, and is a strange and discursive amalgam of humour, acuteness, learning, and credulity. The following enumeration of some of the errors which he endeavours to dispel will serve both to show the kind of subjects he was fond of investigating, and to exemplify the notions which prevailed in the seventeenth century:

That crystal is nothing else but ice strongly congealed; that a diamond is softened or broken by the blood of a goat; that a pot full of ashes will contain as much water as it would without them; that bays preserve from the mischief of lightning and thunder; that an elephant hath no joints; that a wolf, first seeing a man, begets a dumbness in him; that moles are blind; that the flesh of peacocks corrupteth not; that storks will only live in republics and free states; that the chicken is made out of the yolk of the egg; that men weigh heavier dead than alive; that the forbidden fruit was an apple; that there was no rainbow before the Flood; that John the Baptist should not die.

He treats also of the ring-finger, saluting upon sneezing, pigmies, the canicular or dog days, the picture of Moses with horns, the blackness of negroes, the river Nilus, Gypsies, Methuselah, the food of John the Baptist, the cessation of oracles, Friar Bacon's brazen head that spoke, the poverty of Belisarius, and the wish of Philoxenus to have the neck of a crane. In 1658 Browne published his Hydriotaphia; Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, mainly a discussion of burial-customs. Here the author's learning appears in the details which he gives concerning the modes in which the bodies of the dead have been disposed of in different ages and countries; while his reflections on death, oblivion, and immortality are, for solemnity and grandeur, unsurpassed in English literature, and are set forth in language of rich and gorgeous eloquence. In a field at Walsingham were dug up between forty and fifty urns, containing the remains of human bones, some small brass instruments, boxes, and other fragmentary relics. Coals and burnt substances were found near the same plot of ground, and hence it was conjectured that this was the Ustrina, or place of burning, or the spot whereon the Druidical sacrifices were made. Thus furnished with a theme for his philosophic musings, Sir Thomas Browne comments on that vast charnelhouse the earth. The Hydriotaphia commences:

In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers; who if two or three yards were open above the surface, would not care to rake the bowels of Potosi and regions towards the centre. Nature hath furnished one part of the earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in urns, coins, and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great antiquity, America, lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us. Though, if Adam were made out of an extract of the earth, all parts might challenge a restitution, yet few have returned their bones far lower than they might receive them; not affecting the graves of giants, under hilly and heavy coverings, but content with less than their own depth, have wished their bones might lie soft, and the earth be light upon them; even such as hope to rise again

mixture, and firing out [expelling by means of fire] the ethereal particles so deeply immersed in it'); by making their graves in the air like the Scythians, who swore by wind and sword;' or in the sea, like some of the nations about Egypt.

Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs; and since the religion of one seems madness unto another, to afford an account or rational of old rights requires no rigid reader. That they kindled the pyre aversely, or turning their face from it, was a handsome symbol of unwilling ministration; that they washed their bones with wine and milk; that the mother wrapt them in linen and dried them in her bosom, the first fostering part, and place of their nourishment; that they opened their eyes towards heaven, before they kindled the fire, as the place of their hopes or original, were no improper ceremonies. Their last valediction, thrice uttered by the attendants, was also very solemn, and somewhat answered by Christians, who thought it too little if they threw not the earth thrice upon the interred body. That in strewing their tombs the Romans affected the rose, the Greeks amaranthus and myrtle; that the funeral pyre consisted of sweet fuel, cypress, fir, larix, yew, and trees perpetually

verdant, lay silent expressi of their surviving hopes; wherein Christians, who deck their coffins with bays, have found a more elegant emblem; for that tree seeming dead, will restore itself from the root, and its dry and exsuccous leaves resume their verdure again; which, if we mistake not, we have also observed in furze. Whether the planting of yew in churchyards hold not its original from ancient funeral rites, or as an emblem of resurrection, from its perpetual verdure, may also admit conjecture.

Among felicitous brevities may be quoted :

Nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being both the servants of His providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In belief, all things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself. I had rather stand in the shock of a basilisk than in the fury of a merciless pen. A good cause needs not to be patroned by passion, but can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute.

To the Hydriotaphia is appended a small treatise, the most whimsical and not the least laborious of his works-The Garden of Cyrus; or the Quincuncial Lozenge, Network Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, and mystically considered. It aims to prove that the mystical number five pervaded not only ancient horticulture, but that it recurs through plant and animal life. Coleridge says Browne 'finds quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes on earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything.' One of the most striking of these fancies has been often quoted. Wishing to denote that it is late, or that he was writing at a late hour, he says that the quincunx of heaven [the Hyades] runs low, and . . . we are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep; . . . to keep our eyes open longer were but to act our antipodes; the huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' Among Browne's posthumous pieces are Miscellany Tracts (1683), A Letter to a Friend (1690), and a collection of aphorisms or jottings, entitled Christian Morals, apparently intended as a kind of continuation of the Religio Medici. He left in MS. also various essays on antiquarian and other subjects. Sir Thomas Browne died in 1682, at the age of seventy-seven; in 1840 his skull was stolen out of its grave in St Peter's Mancroft, and placed in the hospital museum. He was of a modest, simple, and cheerful disposition, retiring in his habits, and sympathised little with the pursuits and feelings of the busy multitude. He sided with the king in the Civil War, and was knighted by Charles II. Though he made it his business to combat vulgar errors,' his own mind was deeply tinged with the credulity of his age. He clung to the discredited Ptolemaic system;

Though Browne's works are unsystematic, desultory, unequal, his thought, like his style, is strikingly original, marked by high and оссаsionally transcendent intellectual power, often expressed with quaint humour or searching pathos, and always carrying with it a strange impressiveness. His favourite theme throughout all his books is ever the mystery of death and what lies beyond the grave, and the visible signs of mortality mean as much to him as they did to Shakespeare himself as a text from which to descant on what transcends the little sphere of human life. His style is too peculiar, idiomatic, and difficult ever to be generally popu lar, and it must be admitted that his studious brevity often lapses sadly into obscurity. In his own words, 'the quality of the subject will sometimes carry us into expressions beyond mere English apprehensions;' and indeed no writer has equalled him in the free coinage of Latinisms. Thus, speaking in his Vulgar Errors of the nature of ice, he says: 'Ice is only water congealed by the frigidity of the air, whereby it acquireth no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its diffluency, and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth there anything properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity; for the determination of quicksilver is properly fixation; that of milk, coagulation; and that of oil and unctuous bodies, only incrassation.' He employs abundantly such words as dilucidate, ampliate, resipiency, opinionatry, manuduction, indigitate, reminiscential, evocation, farraginous, advenient, ariolation, lapifidical. He also uses words of Latin origin in their etymological sense, Ideals freely in technical terms from the sciences, and does not hesitate to coin Grecisms or use modern French and Italian words. Yet his Latinisms and innovations seem rhetorically in harmony with the rolling rhythm of his marvellous prose.

Dr Johnson's style shows obvious resemblances to Browne's, especially in its Latinistic vocabulary. There can be no doubt that the author of the Rambler acquired much of his fondness for grandiloquent and sonorous words and expressions from the writings of the learned knight of Norwich; the Life of Browne prefixed to an edition of the Christian Morals (1756) was by Johnson. It is needless to say that Johnson's clear and graceful use of his much less audaciously Latinist vocabulary differs from Browne's abstruse and often involved and obscure style of disquisition perhaps more than it resembles it. It is inevitable that Browne's con

templative, inquisitive, fantastic pensiveness should be compared and contrasted with the more sombre and less poetical but equally humorous temperament of his earlier contemporary, Burton, the anatomist of melancholy. Cowper's Task shows many traces of the Morals. Coleridge, who was so well qualified to appreciate the writings of Browne, has numbered him among his first favourites. Rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits; contemplative, imaginative, often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though, doubtless, too often big, stiff, and hyper-Latinistic.

He is a quiet and sublime

enthusiast, with a strong tinge of the fantast : the humorist constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot-silk play upon the main dye.' Coleridge insists, too, on the entireness of Browne in every subject before him. He never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. To this should be added the complete originality of his mind. He is manifestly like no other writer, and his quaint, profound, and mystical abstractions, stamped with his peculiar style, carry the imagination by an inevitable fascination back into the primeval ages of the world, or forward into the depths of eternity. Browne's influence on English literature has been deep and lasting, if not very wide in extent. No writer bears the impress of his influence more strongly marked, alike in style and cast of thought, than Charles Lamb, who indeed boasted that he was the first 'among the moderns' to discover his excellences. Hazlitt, Carlyle, and Pater paid their tribute to him. De Quincey ranked him with Jeremy Taylor as the richest and most dazzling of rhetoricians, and Lowell called him 'our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare :' perhaps it is truer to say that his supremest merit rests in his being the highest type of the profound humorist, to whom all existence had been but food for contemplation.'

Oblivion.

What song the syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names as they have done for their relicks, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which, in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against pride, vainglory, and madding vices. Pagan

vain-glories, which thoug to the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vainglories, who acting early and before the probable meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already out-lasted their monuments and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of time we cannot expect such mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias; and Charles V. can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector.

And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons; one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment.

Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things. Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell Graveus how we may he buried in our survivors. stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets or first letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have new names given us, like many of the mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages.

To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan; disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself, who cares to subsist, like Hippocrates' patients, or Achilles' horses in Homer, under naked nominations, without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsam of our memories, the entelechia and soul of our subsistences. To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name than Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good thief than Pilate?

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit or perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since