He has had Samuel Johnson among his
greatest admirers, and Coleridge, and Carlyle, and Hazlitt, and Lytton,
and Walter Pater, and Leslie Stephen, and Professor Saintsbury; than whom
no one of them all has written better on Browne. And he has had princely
editors and annotators in Simon Wilkin, and Dr. Greenhill, and Dr. Lloyd
Roberts. I must leave it to those eminent men to speak to you with all
their authority about Sir Thomas Browne's ten talents: his unique natural
endowments, his universal scholarship, his philosophical depth, 'his
melancholy yet affable irony,' his professional and scientific
attainments, and his absolutely classical English style. And I shall
give myself up, in ending this discourse, to what is of much more
importance to him and to us all, than all these things taken
together,--for Sir Thomas Browne was a believing man, and a man of
unfainting and unrelaxing prayer. At the same time, and assuming, as he
does, and that without usurpation, as he says, the style of a Christian,
he is in reality a Theist rather than a Christian: he is a moral and a
religious writer rather than an evangelical and an experimental writer.
And in saying this, I do not forget his confession of his faith.
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