Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to Bernard Barton, [10 August 1825]
We shall be soon again at Colebrook.
DEAR B.
B.—You must excuse my not writing before, when I tell you we are on
a visit at Enfield, where I do not feel it natural to sit down to a Letter. It
is at all times an exertion. I had rather talk with you, and Ann Knight, quietly at Colebrook Lodge, over
the matter of your last. You mistake me when you express misgivings about my
relishing a series of scriptural poems. I wrote confusedly. What I meant to say
was, that one or two consolatory poems on deaths would have had a more
condensed effect than many. Scriptural—devotional topics—admit of infinite
variety. So far from poetry tiring me because religious, I can read, and I say
it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms in our Prayerbooks for an
hour or two together sometimes without sense of weariness.
I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false
topic insisted on so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of
Infants. I know something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken.
It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy to the ![]()
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Survivors—but still a fallacy. If it stands on the doctrine of this being a
probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma. Omniscience, to whom
possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child, what it would
hereafter turn out: if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from
falling into future wilfulness, vice, &c. If bad, I do not see how its
exemption from certain future overt acts by being snatched away at all tells in
its favor. You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the finger of a pickpurse,
but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as if never so much acted?
Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a hundred left, whose trial
humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among the obscurities of
providence. The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it. The
all-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when
he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be condemn’d before
commission. In these things we grope and flounder, and if we can pick up a
little human comfort that the child taken is snatch’d from vice (no great
compliment to it, by the bye), let us take it. And as to where an untried child
goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the
day—fire-purified martyrs, and torment-sifted confessors—what know we? We
promise heaven methinks too cheaply, and assign large revenues to minors,
incompetent to manage them. Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation, till
the very frequency induces a cheapness. Tickets for admission into Paradise are
sculptured out at a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, &c. It is all a
mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear)
the more I flounder. Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is
the unerring judge, seems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a
half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of
walks, and idle to our hearts desire. Taylor has dropt the London. It was
indeed a dead weight. It has got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my
part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light and merry shoulders. It had
got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that is bad. Both our kind
remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself,
and stranger’s-greeting to Lucy—is
it Lucy or Ruth?—that gathers wise
sayings in a Book.
Bernard Barton (1784-1849)
Prolific Quaker poet whose verse appeared in many of the literary annuals; he was an
acquaintance of Charles Lamb.
Lucy Barton (1808 c.-1898)
The daughter of the Quaker poet Bernard Barton; she married the poet Edward Fitzgerald in
1856, but they soon separated. She published religious works.
Anne Knight [née Waspe] (1792-1860)
Quaker writer for children, the daughter of Jonathan Waspe; in 1818 she married James
Knight. She was a Woodbridge friend and of Bernard Barton, not the Quaker abolitionist of
the same name (1786-1862).
