life was passed. His work, late one
night, draws to a natural close:--"To keep our eyes open longer," he
bethinks himself suddenly, "were but to act our Antipodes. The
huntsmen are up in America!"

What a fund of open-air cheerfulness, there! in turning to sleep.
Still, even when we are dealing with a writer in whom mere style counts
for so much as with Browne, it is impossible to ignore his matter; and
it is with religion he is really occupied from first to last, hardly
less than Richard Hooker. And his religion, too, after all, was a
religion of cheerfulness: he has no great consciousness of evil in
things, and is no fighter. His religion, if one may say so, was all
profit to him; among other ways, in securing an absolute staidness and
placidity of temper, for the intellectual work which was the proper
business of his life. His contributions to "evidence," in the Religio
Medici, for instance, hardly tell, because he writes out of view of a
really philosophical criticism. What does tell in him, in this
direction, is the witness he brings to men's instinct of survival--the
"intimations of immortality," as Wordsworth terms them, which [159]
were natural with him in surprising force. As was said of Jean Paul,
his special subject was the immortality of the soul; with an assurance
as personal, as fresh and original, as it was, on the one hand, in
those old half-civilised people who had deposited the urns; on the
other hand, in the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century, who
did not think, but knew, that his soul was imperishable. He lived in
an age in which that philosophy made a great stride which ends with
Hume; and his lesson, if we may be pardoned for taking away a "lesson"
from so ethical a writer, is the force of men's temperaments in the
management of opinion, their own or that of others;--that it is not
merely different degrees of bare intellectual power which cause men to
approach in different degrees to this or that intellectual programme.
Could he have foreseen the mature result of that mechanical analysis
which Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there
is no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen
hypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age, the intellectual
powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to
which the supernatural view of things is still credible. The
non-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adher