Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall (New York Review Books Classics)
“The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppy seed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne’s thought’s describe.” —W. G. Sebald, author of The Rings of Saturn“Sir Thomas Browne, the wonderful 17th century baroque prose stylist and Borgesian speculative essayist whose works (such as Urne-Burial and Religio Medici) are inimitable idiosyncratic classics on the order of theAnatomy of MelancholyandTristram Shandy.” —New York Observer “How does one recommend to the modern reader a writer whose two masterpieces are a rambling mediation about faith and human variety, and a study of burial customs? Yet Browne is one of the greatest of our prose writers, religious and at the same time intensely rational, and he observed the details of human life like the physician he was.” —The Observer(London) “Browne is a cracked archangel.” —Herman Melville “Browne is one of the great English prose stylists—the very greatest, some critics have even said and in certain respects he is the prose equivalent to the great ‘Metaphusicals’ in verse.” —The Irish Times “Browne has paved the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life within. . . . He is the ﬁrst of the autobiographers.”  —Virginia Woolf “The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppy seed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne’s thought’s describe.” —W. G. Sebald, author ofThe Rings of Saturn “Scholars and polymaths come and go, but for sheer idiosyncrasy few could beat Sir Thomas Browne the 17th century doctor, botanist, naturalist, theologian, historian and mystic whose work comprises one of the most fascinatingly esoteric bodies of knowledge in English.” —Tim Martin,The Times(London)  Praise forUrne-Buriall: “One of the most celebrated examples of 17th century prose.” —The New York Times “It smells in every word of the sepulchre.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “LikeHamlet, it is full of quotes . . . Browne is a miniaturist, and elegant raiser of ideas and a provoker of ideas in other: it was in a long note made in his copy by Coleridge that the very word ‘marginalia’ was invented. You can dip in and out ofUrne-Burial: ‘genially ambling prose,’ as Terry Eagleton characterized Browne’s generous, inquisitive style. It is the most soothing of mement mori.” —The Guardian(London)  Praise forReligio Medici:“A literary and medical classic.” —Irish Times “No desert island would be all bad that had upon it copies of Sir Thomas Browne’sReligio Mediciand Robert Burton’sAnatomy of Melancholy.” —The Age(Melbourne) “Perhaps the two greatest meditations on ageing in English, Sir Thomas Browne’sReligo Mediciand Robert Burton’sAnatomy of Melancholy.” —Sunday Times(London) “One of the masterworks of English prose” —Sunday Times(London)