Notes on Sir Thomas Browne and Maria Edgeworth

5] [...] Dr Grene lifted from the tale my father’s od copy of Religio Medici and looked at it idly enough. I was surprised when my father died to see that the book was printed in [97] 1867, although I knew he had it always for many years. His name, and the place Southampton, and the date 1888 were of course pencilled onto the flyleaf, but still I hoped maybe the book had been ut into his youthful hands by the hands of his own father, my grandfather a person of course hom I never met. It might have been. So that when I held it in my hands, there was as it were a history of hands surrounding the little volume, the hands of my own people. Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.
Because I knew the little book so well, I could guess that Dr. Grene was looking at. It was the picture of Sir Thomas Browne, with a beard. Perhaps as he looked at that beard, a very fierce jutting object in a round engraving, he may suddenly have been regretting the loss of his own. Sampson, Low, Son, and Marston were the printers. The Son was beautiful. The son of Sampson Low. Who was he, who was he? Did he labour under the whip of his father, or was he treated with gentleness and respect? J. W. Willis Bund supplied the notes. Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birsong in the bushes of things. If J. W. Willis Bund can pass away forgotten, how much easier for me? We share in that at least.
Son. As little I know about my own son. The son of Roseanne Clear.
‘An old book,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Whose name is that, Mrs McNulty, Joe Clear?’
Dr Grene now had a perplexed look on his face, a very deep thinking look, like a young boyy figuring out an arithmetic problem. If he had had a pencil he might have licked the head.
He had shaved his beard and ws no long hiding his face, so I felt suddenly I owed him something.
‘My father,’ I said.
‘He was an educated man then?’
‘He was indeed. He was a minister’s son. From Collooney.’
‘Collooney,’ he said. ‘Collooney suffered so in the troubles in the twenties,’ he said. ‘I am glad somehow that one time there was a man there that read the Religio Medici.’
The way he said the last two words slowly I knew he had never encountered the book before.
Dr Grene opened the book further, passing the introduction, and hunting mildly for the beginning of the book, as a person does.
‘“To the reader. Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end ...”’
Dr Grene gave a strange little laugh, not a true laugh at all, but a sort of miniature cry. Then he laid the book back where he had found it.
‘I see,’ he said, though I had said nothing. Perhaps he was talking to the old bearded face in the book, or to the book itself. Seventy-six, Thomas Browne was when he died, a youngster compared to me. He died on his birthday, as it sometimes happens, if rarely. I suppose Dr Grene is about sixty or so. I had never seen him quite so solemn as this day. (pp.98-99.)

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne and Maria Edgeworth as sources of epigraphs in The Secret Scripture (2008)

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne and Maria Edgeworth
as sources of epigraphs in The Secret Scripture (2008)