This little book does double duty: first, it gives me a pocket-sized bit of Browne to carry around should I ever need to ponder death, fame, legacy and salvation. Of this I have little to say, except that it's just as good as people say stylistically, and a bit better than they say in content (i.e., this is not teenage nihilism), unless you're the kind of person who assumes that if a good writer disagrees with you, s/he is obviously being ironic.

Second, it gave me a tiny bit of Sebald at the start. I've read one and a half of Sebald's books; one was nothing special the other was utter guff. And here we have some more guff. The difference between Sebald (and other writers like him, including even some I quite like--I'm looking at you, Marias, and your 'Dark Back of Time') and Browne is that Sir Thomas takes an event in the real world to ponder things of immediate importance to most people (here, death, fame, legacy, salvation), and also consider what previous very smart people have actually said about it. A Sebald takes an event in his mind as an opportunity to ponder events that happened to himself, and also to make up stuff that could hypothetically have happened but almost certainly did not (Browne attending the dissection painted by Rembrandt), which can then help him make a point that is either obvious or uninteresting (to me).

I know this is a thing that people do right now: look at this coincidence! How fascinating! Isn't life sad? But if the coincidence probably didn't happened, and you're not interested in the 'fascinating' thing (e.g., dissection), and you don't think life is sad, this kind of essayism has nothing to offer you other than style.

Conclusion:

I'd rather read Browne than Sebald. ( )

[From The Gentleman in the Parlour, Heinemann, 1930; Vintage Classics, 2001; XXVI, 105; XXXVI, 160:]

The village street was bordered by tamarinds and they were like the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne, opulent, stately and self-possessed.

I can bear it better when this kind of stately writing is done by our forefathers. The grand style became them. I am awed by the magnificence of Sir Thomas Browne; it is like staying in a great Palladian palace with frescoes by Veronese on the ceilings and tapestries on the walls. It is impressive rather than homely. You cannot see yourself doing your daily dozen in those august surroundings.

[From The Summing Up, The Literary Guild of America, 1938, xii, 33-34, 36-37:]

Simplicity is not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I have aimed at it because I have no gift for richness. Within limits I admire richness in others, though I find it difficult to digest in quantity. I can read one page of Ruskin with delight, but twenty only with weariness. The rolling period, the stately epithet, the noun rich in poetic associations, the subordinate clauses that give the sentence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that of wave following wave in the open sea; there is no doubt that in all this there is something inspiring. Words thus strung together fall on the ear like music. The appeal is sensuous rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all. Your mind wanders. This kind of writing demands a subject that will suit it. It is surely out of place to write in the grand style of inconsiderable things. No one wrote in this manner with greater success than Sir Thomas Browne, but even he did not always escape this pitfall. In the last chapter of Hydriotaphia the matter, which is the destiny of man, wonderfully fits the baroque splendour of the language, and here the Norwich doctor produced a piece of prose that has never been surpassed in our literature; but when he describes the finding of his urns in the same splendid manner the effect (at least to my taste) is less happy. When a modern writer is grandiloquent to tell you whether or no a little trollop shall hop into bed with a commonplace young man you are right to be disgusted.

[...]

For to write good prose is an affair of good manners. It is, unlike verse, a civil art. Poetry is baroque. Baroque is tragic, massive and mystical. It is elemental. It demands depth and insight. I cannot but feel that the prose writers of the baroque period, the authors of King James's Bible, Sir Thomas Browne, Glanville, were poets who had lost their way. Prose is a rococo art. It needs taste rather than power, decorum rather than inspiration and vigour rather than grandeur. Form for the poet is the bit and the bridle without which (unless you are an acrobat) you cannot ride your horse; but for the writer of prose it is the chassis without which your car does not exist.

Had a lot of trouble following this book at times but think that it will be worth a re-read when I have more cognitive resources to devote to the book. ( )