"that in the printed letters the reader will lose the curious varieties
of writing with which the originals abound, and which are scrupulously
adapted to the subject."

Also, he was a true "collector," delighting in the personal finding of a
thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little
accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's _Emblems_, "that old
book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at last, he values none
the less because a child had coloured the plates with his paints. A
lover of household warmth everywhere, of that tempered atmosphere which
our various habitations get by men's living within them, he "sticks to
his favourite books as he did to his friends," and loved the "town,"
with a jealous eye for all its characteristics, "old houses" coming to
have souls for him. The yearning for mere warmth against him in another,
makes him content, all through life, with pure brotherliness, "the most
kindly and natural species of love," as he says, in place of the
_passion_ of love. Brother and sister, sitting thus side by side, have,
of course, their anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the
faint sun alone, and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely
what amount of melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old
age, so steadily foreseen; make us note also with pleasure, his
successive wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing
over what is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for
enjoying the more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he
could throw the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or
threadbare; has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum
preoccupations of very weak people, down to their little pathetic
"gentilities," even; while, in the purely human temper, he can write of
death, almost like Shakespeare.

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 Aus