off their malice with their bodies, and Cæsar and Pompey accord in Latin hell; yet Ajax, in Homer, endures not a conference with Ulysses: and Deiphobus appears all mangled in Virgil's ghosts, yet we meet with perfect shadows among the wounded ghosts of Homer.
Since Charon in Lucian applauds his condition among the dead, whether it be handsomely said of Achilles, that living contemner of death, that he had rather be a ploughman's servant, than emperor of the dead? How Hercules his soul is in hell, and yet in heaven; and Julius his soul in a star, yet seen by Æneas in hell?—except the ghosts were but images and shadows of the soul, received in higher mansions, according to the ancient division of body, soul, and image, or simulachrum of them both. The particulars of future beings must needs be dark unto ancient theories, which Christian philosophy yet determines but in a cloud of opinions. A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the state of this world,[B 1] might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato's den, and are but embryo philosophers.
Pythagoras escapes in the fabulous hell of Dante,[A 1] among that swarm of philosophers, wherein, whilst we meet with Plato and Socrates, Cato is to be found in no lower place than purgatory. Among all the set, Epicurus is most considerable, whom men make honest without an Elysium, who contemned life without encouragement of immortality, and making nothing after death, yet made nothing of the king of terrors.
Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be nothing and return into their chaos again.
- ↑ Del Inferno, cant. 4.
- ↑ A Dialogue, &c.] In one of Sir Thomas's Common-place Books, (see vol. iv, p. 379,) occurs this sentence, apparently as a memorandum to write such a dialogue. And from "A Catalogue of MSS. written by, and in the possession of Sir Thomas Browne, M. D. late of Norwich, and of his Son Dr. Edward Browne, late President of the College of Physicians. London," in the Bodleian Library, (MSS. Rawlinson. 390, xi, ) it appears that he actually did write such a Dialogue. I have searched, hitherto in vain, for it, as I have elsewhere lamented.—Rel. Med. p. 58, note. Should I meet with it in time, it will he inserted at the end of vol. iv.
