scovery, 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. For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes [121]
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, 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
wo