ROBERT BURTON (1577-1640).  Burton is famous chiefly as the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the most astonishing books in all literature, which appeared in 1621.  Burton was a clergyman of the Established Church, an incomprehensible genius, given to broodings and melancholy and to reading of every conceivable kind of literature.  Thanks to his wonderful memory, everything he read was stored up for use or ornament, till his mind resembled a huge curiosity shop.  All his life he suffered from hypochondria, but curiously traced his malady to the stars rather than to his own liver.  It is related of him that he used to suffer so from despondency that no help was to be found in medicine or theology; his only relief was to go down to the river and hear the bargemen swear at one another.

Burton’s Anatomy was begun as a medical treatise on morbidness, arranged and divided with all the exactness of the schoolmen’s demonstration of doctrines; but it turned out to be an enormous hodgepodge of quotations and references to authors, known and unknown, living and dead, which seemed to prove chiefly that “much study is a weariness to the flesh.”  By some freak of taste it became instantly popular, and was proclaimed one of the greatest books in literature.  A few scholars still explore it with delight, as a mine of classic wealth; but the style is hopelessly involved, and to the ordinary reader most of his numerous references are now as unmeaning as a hyper-jacobian surface.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682).  Browne was a physician who, after much study and travel, settled down to his profession in Norwich; but even then he gave far more time to the investigation of natural phenomena than to the barbarous practices which largely constituted the “art” of medicine in his day.  He was known far and wide as a learned doctor and an honest man, whose scientific studies had placed him in advance of his age, and whose religious views were liberal to the point of heresy.  With this in mind, it is interesting to note, as a sign of the times, that this most scientific doctor was once called to give “expert” testimony in the case of two old women who were being tried for the capital crime of witchcraft.  He testified under oath that “the fits were natural, but heightened by the devil’s cooeperating with the witches, at whose instance he [the alleged devil] did the villainies.”

Browne’s great work is the Religio Medici, i.e.  The Religion of a Physician (1642), which met with most unusual success.  “Hardly ever was a book published in Britain,” says Oldys, a chronicler who wrote nearly a century later, “that made more noise than the Religio Medici.”  Its success may be due largely to the fact that, among thousands of religious works, it was one of the few which saw in nature a profound revelation, and which treated purely religious subjects in a reverent, kindly, tolerant way, without ecclesiastical bias.  It is still, therefore, excellent reading; but it is not so much the matter as the manner—­the charm, the gentleness, the remarkable prose style—­which has established the book as one of the classics of our literature.