CHAPTER CXVIII.

POINTS OF SIMILITUDE AND DISSIMILITUDE BETWEEN SIR THOMAS BROWN AND DOCTOR DOVE.

But in these serious works designed
To mend the morals of mankind,
We must for ever be disgraced
With all the nicer sons of taste,
If once the shadow to pursue
We let the substance out of view.
Our means must uniformly tend
In due proportion to their end,
And every passage aptly join
To bring about the one design.
                                                   CHURCHILL.

Dr. Johnson says that, “perhaps there is no human being, however hid in the crowd from the observation of his fellow mortals, who if he has leisure and disposition to recollect his own thoughts and actions, will not conclude his life in some sort a miracle, and imagine himself distinguished from all the rest of his species by many discriminations of nature or of fortune.” This remark he makes in relation to what Sir Thomas Brown asserts of the course of his own life, that it was “a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable.” Now it is not known that any thing extraordinary ever befell him. “The wonders,” says Johnson, “probably were transacted in his own mind: self-love, cooperating with an imagination vigorous and fertile as that of Brown, will find or make objects of astonishment in every man's life.”

What the Philosopher of Norwich considered as miraculous was probably this, that he had escaped from “Pyrrho's maze,” and had never been contaminated in Epicurus' sty; that he had neither striven for place among the “wrangling crew” nor sought to make his way with the sordid herd; that he had not sold himself to the service of Mammon; but in mature years and with deliberate judgement had chosen a calling in which he might continually increase his knowledge and enlarge his views, and entertain a reasonable hope that while he endeavoured to relieve the sufferings of his fellow creatures and discipline his own mind, the labours wherein his life was past would neither be useless to others nor to himself. He might well consider it a miracle of divine mercy that grace had been given him to fulfil the promise made for him at his baptism, and that he had verily and indeed renounced the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. He might indeed take comfort in his “authentic reflections how far he had performed the great intention of his Maker;—whether he had made good the principles of his nature and what he was made to be; what characteristic and special mark he had left to be observable in his generation; whether he had lived to purpose or in vain; and what he had added, acted, or performed, that might considerably speak him a man.”

There were more resemblances between Sir Thomas Brown and the Doctor than Fluellen discovered between Henry of Monmouth and Alexander the Great. Both graduated in the same profession at the same university; and each settled as a practitioner in a provincial town. (Doncaster indeed was an inconsiderable place compared with Norwich; and Brown merely procured his degree at Leyden, which was not in his time, as it was in Daniel Dove's, the best school of physic in Europe.) Both too were Philosophers as well as Physicians, and both were alike speculative in their philosophy and devout. Both were learned men. Sir Thomas Brown might have said of himself with Herbert,

I know the ways of learning; both the head
    And pipes that feed the press and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
    Or of itself, like a good housewife, spun
In laws and policy: what the Stars conspire;
What willing Nature speaks, what forced by fire;
    Both the old discoveries, and the new found seas:
The stock and surplus, cause and history:
    All these stand open, or I have the keys.

The Doctor could not have said this; he would rather have said,

I am but one who do the world despise
And would my thoughts to some perfection raise,
A wisdom-lover, willing to be wise.1

Yet he was as justly entitled to the appellation of a learned man by his multifarious knowledge, as he was far from pretending to it. There were many things of which he was ignorant, and contented to be ignorant, because the acquirement would not have been worth the cost. Brown would have taken with just confidence a seat at the Banquet of the Philosophers, whereas Dove would have thought himself hardly worthy to gather up the crumbs that fell from their table.

1 LORD STIRLING.

A certain melancholy predominated as much in the constitution of Sir Thomas's mind, as in that of Charles the First, to whom his portrait bears so remarkable a resemblance; and a certain mirth entered as largely into the composition of the Doctor's, as it did into Charles the Second's, to whom in all moral respects no one could be more utterly unlike. The elements have seldom been so happily mixed as they were in the Philosopher of Norwich; he could not have been perfectly homogeneous if a particle of the quintelement had been superadded;—such an ingredient would have marred the harmony of his character: whereas the Philosopher of Doncaster would have been marred without a large portion of it.

It was a greater dissimilarity, and altogether to be regretted, that my Doctor left no “characteristic and special mark to be observable in his generation;” but upon this I shall make some observations hereafter. What led me to compare these persons, incomparable each in his own way, was that my Doctor, though he did not look upon his own history as miraculous, considered that the course of his life had been directed by a singular and special Providence. How else could it have been that being an only son,—an only child, the sole representative in his generation of an immemorial line,—his father instead of keeping him attached to the soil, as all his forefathers had been, should have parted with him for the sake of his moral and intellectual improvement, not with a view to wealth or worldly advancement, but that he might seek wisdom and ensue it?—that with no other friend than the poor schoolmaster of a provincial townlet, and no better recommendation, he should have been placed with a master by whose care the defects of his earlier education were supplied, and by whose bounty, after he had learned the practical routine of his profession, he was sent to study it as a science in a foreign university, which a little before had been raised by Boerhaave to its highest reputation;—that not only had his daily bread been given him without any of that wearing anxiety which usually attends upon an unsettled and precarious way of life, but in the very house which when sent thither in boyhood he had entered as a stranger, he found himself permanently fixed, as successively the pupil, the assistant, the friend, and finally the successor and heir of his benefactor;—above all, that he had not been led into temptation, and that he had been delivered from evil.

“My life,” said an unfortunate poor man who was one of the American Bishop Hobart's occasional correspondents, “has been a chapter of blunders and disappointments.” John Wilkes said that “the chapter of accidents is the longest chapter in the book;” and he, who had his good things here, never troubled himself to consider whether the great volume were the Book of Chance, or of Necessity, the Demogorgon of those by whom no other deity is acknowledged. With a wiser and happier feeling Bishop White Kennett when he was asked “where are we?” answered the question thus,—“in a world where nothing can be depended on but a future state; in the way to it, little comfort but prayers and books.” White Kennett might have enjoyed more comfort if he had been born in less contentious times, or if he had taken less part in their contentions, or if he had been placed in a less conspicuous station. Yet he had little cause to complain of his lot, and he has left behind him good works and a good name.

There is scarcely any man who in thoughtfully contemplating the course of his own life, would not find frequent reason to say,—

                             in fede mia
Ho fatto bene a non fare a mio modo. 2

The Doctor however was one of the very few who have never been put out of their designed course, and never been disposed to stray from it.

                         Spesso si perde il buono
Cercando il meglio. E a scegliere il sentiero
Chi vuol troppo esser saggio,
Del tempo abusa, e non fa mai viaggio. 3

2 RICCIARDETTO.

3 METASTASIO.