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Great success also attended the sale of his three other volumes published in '65, '67, and '69. Mr. Browne's next lecture was entitled "Sixty Minutes in Africa," and was delivered in Musical Fund Hall, Philadelphia. Behind him hung a large map of Africa, "which region," said Artemus, "abounds in various natural productions, such as reptiles and flowers.
Browne's professional prosperity was not impaired by the suspicion which early attached to him, and soon deepened into conviction, that he was addicted to literary pursuits. He was in high repute as a physician.
The Religio Medici, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die in." Urn Burial, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a prose poet of the "inevitable hour":
It was Saturday night, and I had just come in from the veld, while Browne's party had reached Rosebery by the morning train. Dinner had gone rather quietly, and our host had looked bored, I thought. Then, when the ladies had left us, Browne had kindled up, and we all three had a glorious hour, voicing the praises of Africa in a sort of three-man descant or glee.
In an adjoining town to Cleveland there was a snake charmer who called himself Artemus Ward, an ignorant witling or half-wit, the laughing stock of the countryside. Browne's first communication over the signature of Artemus Ward purported to emanate from this person, and it succeeded so well that he kept it up. He widened the conception as he progressed.
The general temperature after noon was 84 degrees, the morning 46 degrees. The prevailing wind was from S.S.E. to E.S.E. and it was invariably cold; at least we felt it so, and I regretted to observe, that in Mr. Browne's case it caused a renewed attack of violent pains in the muscles and joints, from which he had before been somewhat free.
Some of the most powerful passages that ever fell from Sir Thomas Browne's pen are to be come upon in the Introduction to the Pseudodoxia.
Quite near, through Welmina and a certain final gap of the Hills, Friedrich with the vanguard does emerge, "an hour before sunset;" overhanging Browne; not above a mile from the Camp of Browne. A very large Camp, that of Browne's, flanked to right by the Elbe; goes from Sulowitz, through Lobositz, to Welhoten close on Elbe; and has properties extremely well worth studying just now!
He was the author of several books on religious and quasi-scientific subjects, including one on the Choice of a Religion, on the Immortality of the Soul, Observations on Spenser's Faery Queen, and a criticism on Sir T. Browne's Religio Medici. He also wrote a Discourse on Vegetation, and one On the Cure of Wounds by means of a sympathetic powder which he imagined he had discovered.
The stealing of the Hesperian apples, and the penalty entailed, appear to be imitated from the breaking of Pan's tree in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, as does also the devotion and rescue of Perindus . The orc probably owes its origin, directly or indirectly, to Ariosto, and the influence of the Metamorphoses is likewise, as so often, present.
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