of theology, aside, Sir
Thomas lends himself to those moments when a man wants to dip a little
into the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly all the modern
novelists who describe men seem to think that their interior life is
purely emotional. Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,[2] my favourite among the
writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to make his heroes, or
his semi-heroes (there are no good real honest villains in fiction now)
lead lives that are not at all interior. And yet every man either leads
an interior life, or longs to lead an interior life, of which he seldom
talks. He wants inarticulately to know something of the art of
meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when he is successful,
is largely due to the fact that he has never been taught how to
cultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of his
imitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As a
book of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points.
For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on the
difference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in
this way:

Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without
heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another
filed before him, according to the quality of his desert and
pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these
times and the bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it
was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the
integrity and cradle of well-ordered politics: till corruption
getteth ground;--ruder desires labouring after that which wiser
considerations contemn;--every one having a liberty to amass and
heap up riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase
anything.

[2] Mr. Walpole has almost forfeited the allegiance of people who
admired his quality of well-bred distinction by writing in "The
Young Enchanted" of George Eliot as a "horse-faced genius."

There are singular beings who have tried to read "Religio Medici"
continuously. Was it Shakespeare, whose works were presented to one of
this class? "How do you like Shakespeare?" the amiable donor asked. "I
can't say yet; I have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous that
human beings should exist who take this attitude towar