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The title, at least, of the Urn-Burial is more familiar to the most of us than that of the Pseudodoxia. It was the chance discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk that furnished Sir Thomas with the occasion to write his Hydriotaphia.
It is with regret that the writer feels obliged to differ from the distinguished author of the work quoted regarding urn-burial, for notwithstanding that it has been employed by some of the Central and Southern American tribes, it is not believed to have been customary, but to a very limited extent, in North America, except as a secondary interment.
In 1658, the discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk gave him occasion to write Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or a Discourse of sepulchral Urns; in which he treats, with his usual learning, on the funeral rites of the ancient nations; exhibits their various treatment of the dead; and examines the substances found in his Norfolcian urns.
'Mine is that mystical philosophy, from whence no true scholar becomes an atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, grows up a real divine, and beholds, not in a dream, as Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object, the types of his resurrection. Nor can he dedicate his Urn-Burial to his worthy and honoured friend without counselling him to 'run up his thoughts upon the Ancient of Days, the antiquary's truest object'; so continually does Browne's imagination in all his books pierce into and terminate upon Divine Persons and upon unseen and eternal things.
He does not go deep into the Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn-Burial, or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation; no one relishes a recondite beauty more.
To his treatise on urn-burial, was added the Garden of Cyrus, or the quincunxial Lozenge, or network Plantation of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically, considered.
His latest work, with its musical title, Per Amica Silentia Lunae , has both in spirit and form something of the ecstasy and quaint beauty of Sir Thomas Browne. I had supposed that such a style as that displayed in Urn-Burial was a lost art; but Mr. Yeats comes near to possessing its secret. This book is like a deep pool in its limpidity and mystery; no man without genius could have written it.
He ultimately settled and practised at Norwich. Other books are Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Enquiries into Vulgar Errors , Hydriotaphia, or Urn-burial ; and The Garden of Cyrus in the same year. After his death were pub. his Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals. B. is one of the most original writers in the English language.
Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal apostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown's 'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial, or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying, do you know what would have happened?
'The conclusion of the essay on Urn-Burial, says Carlyle, 'is absolutely beautiful: a still elegiac mood, so soft, so deep, so solemn and tender, like the song of some departed saint an echo of deepest meaning from the great and mighty Nations of the Dead. Sir Thomas Browne must have been a good man. The Garden of Cyrus is past all description of mine. 'The Garden of Cyrus must be read.
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