587C Browne, Sir Thomas. (1605-1682) The Works Of the Learned Sr Thomas Brown, Kt. Doctor of Physick, late of Norwich. Containing I. Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. II. Religio Medici: With Annotations and Observations upon it. III. Hydriotaphia; or, Urn-Burial: Together with The Garden of Cyrus. IV. Certain Miscellany Tracts. with Alphabetical Tables.

London: Tho. Basset, Ric. Chiswell, Tho. Sawbridge, Charles Mearn, and Charles Brome, 1686

$2,500

Folio, 12.4 x 7.6 in. First edition. A6, (a)4, B-Z4, Aa-Zz4, Aaa-Iii4, Kkk6, Lll-Qqq4, Rrr6, Sss-Zzz4, Aaaa-Dddd4, Eeee2. This copy has the portrait of Browne by R. White; the engraving of the urns is bound before the Hydriotaphia, and the engraving of the quinqunx is bound opposite the title for the Garden of Cyrus. This copy is in good condition. It is bound in eighteenth century quarter calf which has been rebacked.

“Browne […] enjoyed nearly half a century of quiet professional life, and five and forty years of it in the same place. He was well off; he had plenty of books and collections round him; and he was in correspondence with many learned men of tastes similar to his own—Evelyn being the chief of them so far as England was concerned, though even Iceland was reached by his curiosity. He had read very widely; to speak disrespectfully of Browne’s learning would be more than a little rash, and might provoke doubts as to the coextensiveness of the speaker’s own erudition. Above all, he had an intense idiosyncrasy of mental attitude, and a literary gift hardly surpassed in its own special way. It was impossible that such a combination of gift and circumstance should not find its expression.”

“Hydriotophia and The Garden of Cyrus are, in effect […] occasions […] for the outpouring of their author’s remarkable learning, of his strange quietist reflection on the mysteries of the universe, of his profound though unobtrusive melancholy, of the intensely poetical feeling which denied itself poetical expression  and, above all, of his unique and splendid style. They were the last things that he himself published—uniting them, a year after their first appearance, to Pseudodoxia in its third edition, and Religio in its fifth authorised form.” (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature,18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.)

Wing B-5150; Eimas 490; Olser 4522; Waller 1539; Wellcome II p. 253