And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is
accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to
home and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the accustomed
in religion, which we may notice in him. He is one of the last votaries
of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of hope and awe,
which may be described as the religion of men of letters (as Sir Thomas
Browne has his _Religion of the Physician_), religion as understood by
the soberer men of letters in the last century, Addison, Gray, and
Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later. A high way of feeling
developed largely by constant intercourse with the great things of
literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still,
this religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system of
received sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things of
literature and art, in the first instance, on the authority of a long
tradition, in the course of which they have linked themselves in a
thousand complex ways to the conditions of human life, and no more
questioned now than the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness--say!
of Shakespeare.
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