A Note on Religio Medici and some of its Critics*

Extract

Sir Thomas Browne has puzzled his critics. His high rank as one of the great writers of English prose is well established, but he has been read in different and sometimes incompatible ways. Professor Basil Willey, in his illuminating chapters on Browne in The Seventeenth Century Background, reminds us that “It is a romantic falsification to ‘relish’ Browne for his ‘quaintness’”. This was the nineteenth-century tendency from the time when Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge rediscovered him to the essays of Walter Pater (Macmillan's liv, 1886; Appreciations, 1889) and Sir Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library, Second Series, 1876) at the close of the period. Pater uses the word quaint and also humourist, although he circumscribes each with definitions.