ten 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. For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes the
solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects of his
immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an expression
of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound quiet, that
quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy, working, we might
say, on the principle of the _opus operatum,_[88] almost without any
co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the higher self.
And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned temperament mere
physical stillness has its full value; such natures seeming to long for
it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with a sort of mystical
sensuality.

The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value
of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour,
and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental character
of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his life, a
genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest in those
hard shadows of _Rosamund Grey_, is always there, though not always
realised either for himself or his readers, and restrained always in
utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on the surface of life and
literature among which he for the most part moved, a wonderful force of
expression, as if at any moment these slight words and fancies might
pierce very far into the deeper soul of things. In his writing, as in
his life, that quiet is not the low-flying of one from the first drowsy
by choice, and needing the prick of some strong passion or worldly
ambition, to stimulate him into all the energy of which he is capable;
but rather the reaction of nature, after an escape from fate, dark and
insane as in old Greek tragedy, following upon which the sense of mere
relief becomes a kind of pa