Johnathan F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter 4: Elements of Style

Sir Thomas Browne, Johnathan F. S. Post, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1987

Chapter 4; Elements of Style

Coleridge said as much when he remarked that Religio Medici “is a fine Portrait of a handsome man in his best Cloathes.” (Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley; Durham, 1955, 439) pg. 56

Alexander Ross was the most vigilant in adopting a plain-style attack on the “Rhetorical flourishes” of Religio. “Where is most painting, there is least beauty,” Ross admonishes the reader with proverbial zest… [Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus (London, 1645), dedicatory epistle.] pg 56

Stanley Fish has played Abdiel to a Satanic Browne by ringing a more sophisticated change on Ross’s anti-Papist remarks when he criticizes the author’s art for failing to self-consume: “Browne’s prose betrays no such modesty. It repeatedly calls attention to what it is doing, and what it is doing is displaying Browne to advantage, even when the content is, on its face, prejudicial to him.” (Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkley, 1972), 367. Defending Browne against Fish’s description of him as “The Bad Physician” has become something of a minor industry in Browne criticism. See, for instance, the measured rebuttal by Frank J. Warnke, “A Hook for Amphibium: Some Refelctions on Fish,” in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C.A. Patrides, (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 49-59. ) pg. 56

On the basis of sheer numbers, Browne’s detractors have been heavily outvoted… 57

Joyce knew that he had located a howler when in Ulysses he parodically compressed Browne’s “forget not how assuefaction unto any thing minorates the passion from it” (CM, 3.10, p. 234) into “Assuefactoin minorates atrocities,” and then adds for good measure, “as Tully saith of his darling Stoics.” (James Joyce, Ulysses (1914; reprint, New York: Random House, 1961), 394.) pg. 58

…coinages that are still with us, like “incontrovertible” and “retrogression,” even, happily, “literary” and “medical.” pg. 58

“in defense of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term.” (Samuel Johnson, “Life of Browne,” in Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C.A.Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1977), 508.) pg. 59

Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 2d ed. (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1962), 357.

Morris Croll, collected in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton, 1966) and R. F. Jones, reprinted in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951).

Much of the strangeness of Urne-Buriall is due to the oscillating tide of Latin and Saxon phrases in which the splendid pomp of ambition is played off against the blunt reality of gravestones, while The Garden of Cyrus delivers an extraordinary mélange of simply sown and ripe diction. 60

Along with the witty conjunction of Latin and Saxon diction, Browne favored certain rhetorical figures. Alliteration is the most obvious, as in the sputtering mouthful of “protuberances in Pine-apples” or the lush “flowers of Santfoyne, and French honey suckle.” Inevitably relying on this device to highlight some of his more outrageous bilingualisms like “Cpmogerous animals, which chew the cudd,”… 61


Alliteration in Browne is nearly always a figure of thought; it helps to signal the odd twists of mind, the slight or sudden change in the argument, or to suggest a fine nuance of meaning. It rarely seems gratuitous and is never used, as it was with Ciceronians, to structure the symmetrical development of an idea. 61

Browne was especially fond of at least three other rhetorical figures. He exercised frequently a device called “polyptoton,” which is the repetition of words from the same root but in different forms or with different endings…A second device frequently employed is “homoioteleuton,” the use of different words with similar endings: “And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exoution, liquefaction, fransformation”…The third figure, “catachresis,” defines a device for which Browne is perhaps best known—a wildly unlikely metaphor. Sometimes referred to as a “conceit”… 61-62

…Browne rarely insists on a single absolute point of view. He continually emphasizes shades of meaning, partial perspectives, a desire for precision that admits to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of the task. If Donne was the great practitioner of “masculine persuasive force,” Browne was the aficionado of “Probably” and “Perhaps,”… 62

I doubt whether any author in English has found half as many ways to keep the door slightly ajar. It seems only right that “precarious” should be among his neologisms. 63

If Browne was a connoisseur of doubt, he achieved this distinction by using a frequently rarefied diction, which lent an elevated tone to his prose, in conjunction with a loose or libertine syntax, especially as exemplified in the recently discovered essay “form”. 63

Montaigne also had to seek out a different stylistic strategy from the current Ciceronian model favored by his contemporaries…It generally avoided sudden intellectual turns, which would have been difficult for listeners to follow, and its “finished” style was inhospitable to conveying the motions of thought as they apparently occurred to the author in the process of writing. 64

Bacon, Burton, and Browne…Grouped generally together under the broad category of anti-Ciceronians, these authors as well as others adopted a fundamentally asymmetric syntax. Achieved largely by varying concise, seried utterances of differing length with loose, run-on sentences often held together by weak ligatures… 64

Except for rare occasions, Browne eschewed the fully articulated Ciceronian period. He favored a combination of the curt utterance, associated particularly with Seneca, and a loose or libertine syntax made popular by Montaigne, though Browne generally resisted the vigorous aphorisms of the later Bacon and Burton’s eccentric prolixity. 65

What is most striking about this passage is its unpredictability. In contrast to the Ciceronian period, it does not work toward a single climactic moment but favors instead a series of perceptions held together by a paratactic syntax—that is, a syntax whose clauses are not rigorously subordinated but loosely conjoined either through weak connectors like “and” and “nor” or punctuation that marks a clean break in the author’s thought… 65

Browne’s asyndetic style plays down connections and plays up leaps in thought, not large ones but significant enough to give the impression that the author is musing rather than arguing, refining his perceptions…not advancing a theory… 66

As Robert Boyle made abundantly clear in 1661, the “essay” ought to serve as the preferred medium for recounting scientific experiments; and though Browne is not held up by Boyle as a specific model for imitation, he could certainly make his prose into a precise instrument for rendering… (Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays, London 1661, 1-36.) pg 67