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Updated: June 27, 2025
The Religio Medici is a universally recognised English classic. And the Urn-Burial, the Christian Morals, and the Letter to a Friend are all quite worthy to take their stand beside the Religio Medici.
Palingenesis, resurrection, effected by orderly prescription the "re-individualling" of an "incinerated organism" is a subject which affords us a natural transition to the little book of the Hydriotaphia, or Treatise of Urn-Burial about fifty or sixty pages which, together with a very singular letter not printed till after Browne's death, is perhaps, after all, the best justification of Browne's literary reputation, as it were his own curiously figured urn, and treasure-place of immortal memory.
And yet if the temperament had been deducted from Browne's work that inherent and strongly marked way of deciding things, which has guided with so surprising effect the musings of the Letter to a Friend, and the Urn-Burial we should probably have remembered him little.
In the mounds on the Wateree River, near Camden, S. C., according to Dr. Blanding, ranges of vases, one above the other, filled with human remains, were found. Sometimes when the mouth of the vase is small the skull is placed with the face downward in the opening, constituting a sort of cover. Entire cemeteries have been found in which urn-burial alone seems to have been practiced.
In its first presentation to the public this letter was connected with Browne's Christian Morals; but its proper and sympathetic collocation would be rather with the Urn-Burial, of which it is a kind of prelude, or strikes the keynote. He is writing in a very complex situation to a friend, upon occasion of the death of a common friend.
His favorite books seem to have been Bunyan's "Holy War," Browne's "Urn-Burial," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Fuller's "Worthies," and Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying." Says Barry Cornwall: "Lamb's pleasures lay amongst the books of the old English writers," and Lamb himself uttered these memorable words: "I cannot sit and think books think for me."
One of these islands, Fuga, is especially interesting; urn-burial prevailed in it in the past, the urns in some cases being arranged in a circle around a central urn or altar. Moreover, there is in Fuga a stone building known as the "Castle," with arched doorways, said not to be of Spanish origin, and near by is a plain strewn with human skulls and other bones, probably the scene of a battle.
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