Sir Thomas Browne: A Life
by reid barbour
oxford, 552 pages, $125
Thomas Browne
edited by kevin killeen
oxford, 1,018 pages, $160
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) is one of the most bizarre and attractive figures in English letters. Though his readership has never been wide, he has had many distinguished admirers since the seventeenth century, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, De Quincey, Melville, Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf, and Barbara Pym among them. (When Woolf called Browne’s fans “the salt of the earth,” she was employing the idiom in the sense in which it was originally meant by our savior.) Lytton Strachey came as close as anyone has to putting his finger on the appeal of this melancholy Norwich physician, who wrote equally well about peppercorns and “the wisdome of God in the site and motion of the Sunne,” when he said that Browne’s sentences “seem to carry the reader forward through an immense succession of ages, until at last, with a sudden change of the rhythm, the whole of recorded time crumbles and vanishes before his eyes.”
