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Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> G. K. Chesterton comparing Thomas Browne with Oliver Cromwell remarks that all things considered it was ‘highly probably that the religious ideals of Oliver Cromwell were infinitely inferior to those of Sir Thomas Browne’. He explains that whatever Cromwell’s policy genius ‘his religious ideals practically united him with the meanest drummer in his army’. In contrast ‘we should laugh at the mere idea of Browne’s archaeological emotions and mystical charity being shared by his butler or keeping his gardener awake at night’. Though Ches- terton strangely underestimates the numinous gardeners who occupy Browne’s work and though it is both unrecorded and unlikely that an early modern physician employed a butler his point is the particular religious finery of an author who so steeped himself in the ineffable who in an age of ardent religiosity saw the paradox of the divine unknowability everywhere. Chesterton’s comments occur in a review of Edward Dowden’s Puritan and Anglican who in speaking about Browne ‘is just and sympathetic but not frantic with admiration as he ought to be’. This is not of course frantic in the Cromwellian manner or that of his mean drummer but rather with the zeal of a crusading literary critic whose task is to recognize in Browne a writer in whom quite singularly style was the conduit of mysticism: Style in his sense did not merely mean sound but an attempt to give some twist of wit or symbolism to every clause or parenthesis: when he went over his work again he did not merely polish brass he fitted in gold. This habit of working with a magnifying glass this turning and twisting of minor words is the true parent of mysticism for the mystic is not. a man who reverences large things so much as a man who reverences small ones who reduces himself to a point without parts or magnitude so that to him the grass is really a forest and the grasshopper a dragon. Little things please great minds. (MP)