The rest of Browne's list of errors
Browne's catalogue of vulgar errors went on: the salamander can live in fire, the unicorn has a horn, the swan sings before its death, the forbidden fruit of Eden was an apple, and the frog squirts its venom in its urine. Like every smasher of idols, however, he had idols of his own. He believed in angels, jinn, witches and demons, and in 1664 he took part in the case that condemned two women as witches. The two protested their innocence, and they were hanged all the same.
A doubter's religion
Browne had little taste for women and made fun of the physical side of marriage. He said that he had never married himself, admired those who never wed twice, and would be glad if the human race could be propagated like trees, without the crude and common method. Marriage, he said, was the most foolish act a wise man commits in his whole life, and when he finds what an odd and worthless thing he has done, his fire dies down into deep gloom.
On religion he was modest. He admitted that several things might lead people to suspect him of unbelief: the scandalous gossip about his profession, the natural course of his studies, and his indifference in speech and conduct to religious questions, since he defended no creed fiercely and did not attack the opposing creed with the usual heat. Even so, he ventured to call himself a Christian, and said that he owed the name not just to baptism, schooling or the place of his birth, but to the years of mature judgment in which he had seen and tested it.
Browne felt that the order and wonders of the world pointed to a divine mind, and he wrote that nature is the art of God. He confessed that he had held heretical opinions and doubted the biblical account of creation. Yet he felt that some religion must exist to guide bewildered humanity to the right path, and he criticized proud heretics who thought themselves free of error and who disturbed the social order. He disliked the talk of the Puritans. During the civil war he stayed loyal to Charles I, and Charles II knighted him for his pains.
Urn Burial
Late in life, after some ancient burial vessels full of old bones were dug up in Norfolk, Browne's mind turned to death, and he set down his thoughts in a loose-jointed book that is among the masterpieces of English prose, Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658). The vessels were pot-like urns in which people of ancient times had put the ashes of their dead. Browne thought cremation the vainest way of removing the dead from the earth, and wrote that life is a pure flame and that we live by an invisible sun within us. Yet we go out with shameful haste. He also wrote that generations pass while some trees stand, and that old families do not last three oaks. Perhaps the world, 'in this dusk of time', was nearing its end. To keep from sinking into gloom at the shortness of life, we need the hope of lasting for ever, and to feel oneself immortal is a priceless strengthening of the spirit. Heaven, he thought, is no 'celestial void' but a calm that can be found even within this world of the senses, given a quiet mind. Then, with a hurried step back from the edge of heresy, he closed his Religio Medici with a humble prayer, in which he asked God to give peace to his conscience and mastery over his passions, to let him worship God and love his friends, and he would then be so content that he would pity Caesar. These, he said, were the modest wishes of his most reasonable ambition, and his life was in God's hands, whose will would be done even if it meant his own undoing.
Poetry under Charles I
Meanwhile a group of minor poets, each the true love of someone or other, amused the well-to-do with their love songs and their melodious piety. The king liked them, and they praised him on every occasion, so history calls them the Cavalier poets. One of them, Robert Herrick, followed Ben Jonson in verse and for a time believed that the wine cup brought poetry, so he drank for hours and then studied to be a clergyman. He fell in love more than once, pledged himself to prefer a sweetheart to a wife, and urged young girls to gather rosebuds while they might. He urged his Corinna to rise on a May morning, with the dawn spreading her colored robes over the dewy plants, and to seize the hour, for youth would soon be gone and death would come before they knew they were free.
Many of the poems he published in 1648 in this vein had to be pruned, even for our own loose age. But since a poet must also eat, he left his beloved London in 1629 and took a small parish in a remote corner of Devon, taking his Catullus with him. In time he wrote devout pieces too, and began with a prayer for forgiveness for the profane poems of his unregenerate days, asking God to strike out of his book every line not given to Him. In 1647 the Puritans took his church income away. Through the hard Cromwell years he bore hunger with dignity, and after the Restoration he was returned to his living. He died in his eighties (the source says eighty-four, though he was born in 1591), and Corinna was forgotten.
Thomas Carew did not live so long, but he too spent his time on his sweethearts. Dazzled by feminine beauty, he wrote of it so freely that other poets rebuked his too-explicit verses. The Puritans never forgave Charles I for making him a gentleman of the privy chamber, though perhaps the king overlooked Carew's content because of its polished form, for the poets of that age had a French grace, like Ronsard and the Pleiade, and spoke with a light touch about the heats and tempers of desire.
Sir John Suckling saw much in his thirty-three years. Born in 1609, he came into a large fortune at eighteen, traveled in France and Italy, and was knighted by Charles I. He served under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War, and returned to England in 1632 to become a favorite at court through his handsome face, quick wit, wealth and generosity. Aubrey says that he was the greatest gallant of the age, the best at cards and bowls. His sisters would come to the bowling green and weep for fear he would lose all their portions. He is said to have invented a card game, and though he never married he kept company with many ladies of note. He is said to have handed out silk stockings as a gift at a party, which then counted as a fine ornament. His play Aglaura was staged splendidly at his own great expense. He raised a troop of horse at his own cost to fight for the king, and nearly lost his life trying to rescue the king's minister, Strafford, from prison. But tired of life, he went abroad and died there in poverty and exile.
Richard Lovelace likewise served the king in war and in verse, and was also rich and handsome. Anthony Wood, who saw him at Oxford, thought him the most amiable and beautiful youth he had ever beheld. In 1642 Lovelace led a delegation from Kent to the Long Parliament, then briefly dominated by Presbyterians, to ask that the Anglican order of worship be restored. For this bold petition he was jailed for seven weeks. His lady, Althea, came to the prison to comfort him, and the poet made her immortal in a poem that begins: when love with unconfined wings hovers within my gates, and my divine Althea brings to whisper at the grates; though tangled in her hair and captive to her eyes, ...