INTRODUCTION xliii 



the three. There is a fourth picture, the frontispiece 

 to the fifth edition of the ' Pseudodoxia,' but it is so 

 unlike the others that I doubt very much if it could 

 have been Sir Thomas." l 



Many have discovered a physical likeness to Shake- 

 speare some, indeed, to Christ in Browne's portraits. 

 Taine has discerned in his productions a mental like- 

 ness, a kindred spirit, to Shakespeare, "who, like 

 him, applies himself to living things, penetrates their 

 internal structure, puts himself in communication with 

 their actual laws . . . discerns behind visible phe- 

 nomena a world obscure, yet sublime, and trembles 

 with a kind of veneration, before the vast, indistinct, 

 but populous abyss, on whose surface our little universe 

 hangs quivering." l 



Here I can do no more than allude -'with gratitude 

 to Mr. Edmund Gosse's volume on Browne in the 

 " English Men of Letters Series," one of the many 

 in which he has illumined English Literature. 



The two garden poets of our collection, Abraham 

 Cowley and Andrew Marvell, were, in spite of their 

 closeness of age and similarity of education, of very 

 different poetical complexion. Cowley, the elder by 



1 " Religio Medici": An Address delivered at Guy'.- 

 Hospital, 1905. Reprinted from " The Library," Jan. 1906. 



