SUPPLEMENTARY MEMOIR.
Scarcely a trace remains of the earlier events of Browne's life; nor are we possessed of any memorials whatever, from his own pen, respecting those travels and various adventures which preceded his residence at Norwich. An interesting piece of autobiography must, therefore, have perished; for it is impossible to suppose, that he travelled without observing, or that he observed without recording. And, although (as Johnson has remarked) "he traversed no unknown seas or Arabian deserts," Browne was not the man to have visited even "France and Italy, or resided at Montpellier and Padua," without having stored his note books with much that would have amply repaid the perusal. Besides which, his family connexions were sufficient to have provided him with introductions to foreigners of character and eminence, of which he would eagerly have availed himself. To all these we should have been introduced, and every thing worth remembering in his intercourse with them, would have been preserved. It has, indeed, been conjectured, that "he was an absent and solitary man;" I but I can by no means adopt this opinion:
1 I refer to a series of papers in the Athenæum, No. 93, 1829, entitled The Humourists, the first of which is devoted to Sir Thomas Browne; from which I subjoin the following passage:—"We have endeavoured to rescue Sir Thomas Browne from the imputation of being merely a 'curious thinker,' while we have ever admitted that the philosopher and the humourist are strangely blended in his character. Of his domestic manners and relations little is known. But we may conjecture, from various passages in his works, that the same melancholy enthusiasm and eternal speculation which appear in them, tinged, also, with sad and solemn colours, his daily habits. In all likelihood, he was an absent and solitary man, extracting the
