INTRODUCTION
A closer analogue is another book better known to most English readers. This is Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. The learned Norwich physician tells us of his famous essay: 'This I confess . . . for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable hours composed.' Criticism he disarms by the excuse: 'being a private Exercise directed to my self, what is delivered therein, was rather a Memorial unto me, than an Example or Rule unto any other.'[1]
'Directed to myself', 'a Memorial unto me';—the terms might be thought a reminiscence, they are certainly a happy rendering, of Marcus' Τὰ εἰς Ἑαυτόν, 'his meditations concerning Himself'. Like Marcus too the 'whimsical Knight' had his commonplace books, the armoury upon which he drew for this work and his Christian Morals.
Still more to the point is an even more famous writing, Blaise Pascal's Pensées. Left incomplete and in fragments at his death, it at length came out, with considerable expense to order and textual integrity, in the Port Royal edition, put together in a manner believed to agree with the dead man's purpose. However it be arranged, and arrangements have been many, the sense of the several paragraphs, the liaison of argument, the precise point of those occasional barbed shafts of incomparable irony, can, at least by the ordinary reader, be now surmised and no more. Pascal's general aim is easy to detect, if we have sympathy with him and even dimly share his faith, but the whole is there in promise only, not in performance. I have often entertained the thought that the Meditations grew up like the Pensées, that Marcus had in mind a Defence of Philosophic Belief which he had neither leisure nor ability to complete.
Pascal's Pensées are incomplete and isolated fragments, some written by himself, some dictated, the whole edited and published by other hands. Did the same fate overtake
- ↑ Browne's Preface to Rel. Med.; cf. his Letter to Sir K. Digby, 3 March 1642.
