Thomas Browne: Selected Writings: 21st-Century Oxford Authors book by Kevin Killeen : Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

Format: Softcover

Author: Kevin Killeen

ISBN: 9780198797654

Condition: Used - Very Good


Westcove UK offer a 100% money back guarantee. If for any reason you are not happy with your transaction, please let us know and we will do whatever we can to resolve your issues.

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)