Sir Thomas Browne’s Letter to a Friend

SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S LEITER TO A FRIEND N. J. ENDICOTI I A Letter to a Friend Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend is a very unusual medical version of the traditional formal consolatory letter, weighted by a good deal of moralizing, but also coloured by peculiar and Brownean meditations and curiosities. There seems to be no good reason, at least in this century, for calling it, as Pater' did, "ellin." Perhaps the word Roated into his mind from Coleridge's remark about the "faery" light in which Browne moved. Certainly, after Coleridge , "faery" seems to have come easily to mind. In the history of Pembroke College, Oxford (1897), Douglas Macleane begins his account of Browne with a reference to his period as "an enquiring age of faery and imaginative Baconianism," and as lately as 1950 W. P. Dunn: commenting quite seriously on a passage in Pseudodoxia (II. iii) which was intended facetiously, says "Science is a shadowy, pathless, faery region in which the mystiC and the occult philosopher walk side by side with the experimental investigator." Appreciative as he was of the whole tone and texture of A Letter, Pater felt that the "leading motive" of the essay was "the deep impression Browne had received during those visits, "of a sort of physical beauty in the coming of death," and this view has been strongly echoed and extended by J. A. Symonds and others. It seems to me to be not at all true if taken literally, and, even if regarded with more tolerance, a dubious extension of one element. In places as factual as the post mortem Browne had attended, A Letter might be described as an essay written by a medical "moralist of the Mount" whose Christian convictions and sense of mortality subsume only in particular passages an extraordinary range of medical and humanistic reading, and curiosity about facts and human nature. It is so acute, informative, psychologically tolerant, and realistic, that the sentences of Christian exaltation or imaginative reRection strike us very strongly, as well as, sometimes, Volume XXXVI, Number I, October, 1966 BROWNE'S Letter to a Friend 69 strangely, in their context-their peculiarly seventeenth-century context of discursive learning. Ironic detachment is a fundamental characteristic of Browne's mind in all his writing, and how disconcertingly observant he sometimes is may be sharply illustrated in A Letter by his comment on the "narrowe minded parsimonious miserable & tenacious" covetousness which often increases shortly before death and is commOn enough to be called a "mortall symptome." This young man, he says mildly and unsentimentally of his patient, was "somewhat to yang, and of to noble a mind" to fall into this "stupidity," and goes On to tell us how often physicians "smile to see the heirs and concerned relations" "to gratulate themselves on the sober departure of their friends" though they are in the very presence of "mad passages" of covetousness and meanness. A somewhat different but also slightly ironic smile shows a little earlier when he tells us that certain of the relations in this case "in some hope of a postliminious life" would not have the body coflined before the third day. This brings to Browne's mind the story of the restoration to life of Hippolytus, from which we pass to reflections on the Lazarus story. A phrase from Cicero's De Senectute is echoed in the thought that few men would be content to "cradle it once agayne" to old age and death, and the paragraph is rounded off in Christian terms. As for physical beauty in the coming of death, there is, I think, hardly a phrase on which to build from either the 1690 text or the manuscript; and only in one sentence from an omitted reflection (first printed in 1919 by Sir Geoffrey Keynes from the commonplace-book of Browne's daughter , Elizabeth LyttletonS is there any suggestion of spiritual beauty. The letter opens with remarks about "the commOn fallacy" of consumptive persons who "feel not themselves dying," and we do find such phrases as "soft Departure," "easie Departure," "soft Death," But the process is also described as a "deliberate and creeping progress unto the...