Philip Athans’s Reviews > Harvard Classics, Vol. 3: Essays, Civil and Moral / The New Atlantis / Areopagitica / Tractate on Education / Religio Medici > Status Update

Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici is so wildly and unashamedly antisemitic it descends into what feels like self-parody but is in fact simply deplorable.

Why am I continuing to read this meandering, dogmatic spasm of superstition and xenophobia?

I could write a four-page paragraph, as obsequious as it is verbose, on why I also abandoned the second Milton piece (On Education) but I'd hate to try to compete with the Master Himself.

I must admit that the first paragraph of John Milton's Areopagitica has defeated me. It is a three densely-packed pages long mealy-mouthed flattery of the parliament that I just… can't. Apparently Milton got the law banning privately owned printing presses overturned so he would shut up and go away.

I've finished the Francis Bacon section with "The New Atlantis," an unfinished science fiction novel that's essentially one huge info dump of epic proportions. It's a list of things this secret island nation knows, has, does, has done, and might someday do. Many, many, many diverse things.