Section VIII.

SIR THOMAS BROWN.

"I wonder and admire his entireness in every subject that is before him. He follows it, he never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be the subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that treatise on some urns dug up in Norfolk, how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mold, now a thigh bone, now a skull, then a bit of a mouldered coffin, a fragment of an old tomb-stone with moss in its "Hic jacet," a ghost or a winding sheet, or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind; and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or a gilt " Anno Domini," from a perished coffin top."

C. L.

SELECTIONS.

THE PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC.

THERE is between us one common name and appellation, one faith and necessary body of principles common to us both; and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them or for them; I could never pereeive any rational consequence from those many texts which prohibit the children of Israel to pollute themselves with the temples of the Heathens, we being all Christians and not divided by such detested impieties as might profane our prayers or the place wherein we make them, or that a resolved conscience may not adore her Creator anywhere, especially in places devoted to his service: where, if their devotions offend him, mine may please him; if theirs profane it, mine may hallow it; holy water and crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgment nor abuse my devotion at all: I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeal terms superstition;

my common conversation I do acknowledge austere; my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity; yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions, which may express or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my own arm rather than a church, nor willingly deface the memory of saint or martyr. At the sight of a cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour; I cannot laugh at, but rather pity the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or contemn the miserable condition of friars; for though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of devotion. I could never hear the Ave Maria bell without an elevation, or think it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to err in all, that is, in silence and dumb contempt; whilst therefore they direct their devotions to her, I offered mine to God, and rectify the errors of their prayers by rightly ordering mine own.

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion; or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps, within a few days, I should dissent myself.

It is as uncharitable a point in us to fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs of the Bishop of Rome, to whom as a temporal prince, we owe the duty of good language; I confess there is cause of passion between us; by his sentence I stand excommunicated, heretic is the best language he affords me, yet can no ear witness I ever returned to him the name of antichrist, man of sin, or whore of Babylon; it is the method of charity to suffer without reaction; those usual satyrs, and invectives of the pulpit may perchance produce a good effect on the vulgar, whose ears are opener to rhetoric than logic, yet do they in no wise confirm the faith of wiser believers, who know that a good cause needs not to be patroned by passion, but can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute.

THE STUDENT.

THE world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say