vein of
seriousness which had been in the English from Saxon days. One may see
it everywhere. The Puritans would not have been the power they were if
they had not found congenial soil in the English character. The
Reformation itself, a Protestant may be excused for thinking, owes its
ultimate triumph in England partly to the fact that Englishmen saw in
it a movement towards a more serious and ethical religion than the
Catholicism either of the Middle Age or of the Jesuits. The same thing
may be seen in the narrower fields of literature. The Renaissance {27}
on the whole takes a much more ethical note in England than, for
instance, in France. A little later indeed, in the France of Pascal
and Bossuet, books of devotion and theology were very widely read, as
may be seen in the letters of Madame de Sevigne; but they can never
have had anything like the circulation which they had in England, both
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every one who looks at an
English country-house library is struck by the abundant provision of
sermons, mainly collected, like everything else indeed, in the
eighteenth century. And every reader of Boswell's _Johnson_ has been
impressed by the frequent recurrence of devotional and religious books
in the literary talk of the day, and, what is perhaps more remarkable,
by the fact that wherever Boswell and Johnson go they constantly find
volumes of sermons lying about, not only in the private houses, but
also in the inns where they stay. There never was a period when
"conduct," as Matthew Arnold used to call it, was so admitted to be the
three-fourths of life he claimed for it, as it was between the
Restoration and the French Revolution. It was conduct, not faith,
ethics not religion, the "whole duty of man" in this life, not his
supernatural destiny in another, that mainly occupied the minds of
serious people {28} in that unecclesiastical age. And Johnson,
definite Christian, definite Churchman as he was, full even of
ecclesiastical prejudices, was just the man to appeal to a generation
with such interests as these.

No questions occupied him so much as moral questions. He was all his
life considering how he ought to live, and trying to live better.
People who are in earnest about these things have always found not only
his published prayers or his moral essays, but his life as told by
Boswell full of fortifying and stimulating ethical food. All alike
exhibit a mind that reco